21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How a Neon Light Artist Spends Her Day in the Studio
Lena Imamura, in purple protective glasses, blasts electronic music in her Chinatown art studio in Manhattan as she carefully moves rigid glass between a series of flaming torches.
As the glass shifts among three flames — one long, one sharp, one tiny and pointed — it gets softer and more pliable. Then she can bend it into any shape she wants.
'It's a real dance with this medium,' said Ms. Imamura, the 40-year-old co-owner of GLO Studio, a neon light studio. She added, 'It really is a rhythm, and so I need this electronic music, basically, to get in a rhythmic space and zen out and focus.'
She then bombards the glass with 24,000 volts of electricity to burn out impurities, fills it with argon gas and seals it.
'Once you ignite the tube with electricity, that's when you see the light go on,' she said. 'And what I love about that process is it's like a microcosm of what it means to make a star.'
Ms. Imamura's creativity goes back to her childhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her father, an electronic musician, 'was always tinkering with things' and the two of them would snag discarded computers and other items from the street and repair them at home, she said.
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