A Coin to a Cat was a drawing project and solo exhibition at Almost Perfect in Tokyo, Japapn. The series of drawings was made with Japanese brush pens as I travelled around the country for the first time in the spring of 2019. My essay about the project was published on Glasstire in July 2019.
“Signs are a visual representation of people’s commands or wishes to other people, so they gave me important cultural information even if I couldn’t literally read them. I drew placards, signs, and tags that I found in parks, storefronts, and metro platforms. I have no experience with Japanese, so my inevitable mistakes convey my foreignness. But I like the idea of ‘drawing’ writing, and the Japanese brush pens that I drew with are usually used for calligraphy. I liked how they could be unpredictable or precise depending on how they were used, like language itself.”
— Lauren Moya Ford, Glasstire, July 24, 2019