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.
Now, as she brings her clients’ neon projects to life, Ms. Imamura embraces her inner alchemist.
“I think the magic of being human is creating,” she said. “Our ability to take an idea and make it happen from the abstract to the concrete is alchemy and is what makes us different from everything else.”
She continued: “When I’m holding a neon, it never gets old. It really is like holding a little star, like a souvenir of life.”
Ms. Imamura recently spent a Friday in her studio with The New York Times. She lives in the East Village of Manhattan in a rent-stabilized duplex with her partner, Yuri Masnyj, an artist and assistant dean at the Cooper Union School of Art.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
WAKE-UP GAME I’m kind of obsessed with systems and hacks and anything to make life easier. I have a snooze alarm that is powered by Rise, then the Apple alarm goes off and I snooze that a couple times. I have an alternate ego higher self that I’ve been working with for a while called Space Cat — my future alien embodiment who knows better and is very smart. And so my commander is this system that I’ve created where I can talk to myself in a way that allows me to get things done.
I have A.D.H.D., so it’s like gamifying and making everything novel and fun is really important. This audio comes on that I programmed and generated through A.I., where this lady basically says, like, “Commander, the dawn has started and the spaceship engines are on, the crew is standing by and you’re critical in this mission.” And so that’s what gets me up.
BUMBLING AROUND Yuri makes the coffee. I get to bumble around. My coffee, though, is like my sacred elixir in the morning. Before coffee, I meditate for 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes Yuri and I will have our coffee together and talk about how horrible the world is. And then I’ll jump into work.
PICKING UP MATERIALS Canal Plastics is just one of the few remaining O.G. artist resources left in New York City, I feel like, that’s not a super-corporatized, franchised Blick situation. There used to be a bunch of what looked like junk stores, but they were electrical parts stores. So you could go into one store and it’s just racks and racks of knobs and buttons and circuits and wires.
SCROLLING Metalabel is a new platform for creative releasing. What it looks like functionally is a marketplace where people put their work out in a really beautifully designed way. I’m a partner and operations director.
Normally in tech companies there’s a whiteboard, and everyone just does magic on the whiteboard in meetings with Post-its and stuff. With us, it’s a big roll of paper and essentially instead of a whiteboard, you scroll. And so we have a scroll that’s usually on a table, and that’s how a lot of strategy meetings happen.
ADJUSTING THE SPACE I’m converting the front area of my studio, GLO Studio, into a gallery. And I’m working with this curator, Lora Appleton. She’s the founder of this thing that I am in called the Female Design Council. It’s a membership-based network for women in design. She’s going to be curating a series of designers and artists in the front of the space, and so as part of the launch of that, I’m making a body of work.
I also usually skate from home to wherever. I pause during the winter time. I also had a crazy accident last summer and so I’ve been commanded by Yuri to not. He’s like: “You’re 40. You can’t be doing this.” And he was right. It’s an electrical skateboard, so it goes 26 miles an hour. It’s definitely dangerous. I look probably like a crazy ninja person, holding a piece of plexiglass.
AT THE STUDIO Neon bending is definitely an insane acrobat of hand-eye coordination. You’re melting the glass in a very particular order and way in order to manipulate this rigid glass tube into the shape that you want. It’s a real body exercise.
BOMBARDING You bring it over to the bombarding station, which is like the mad scientist table. I call it Frankenstein’s Table. You’re electrifying this hunk of glass so that it lights up and comes alive. You usually dip the part you don’t want illuminated into blackout paint so that you don’t see it, and so it’s a vat of paint that you dip the neon into, which is really cool.
When I go into bending mode and when I put the music on, it kind of is a little bit like “Sailor Moon” transformation, where you’re like: “I’m now the glass master. I’m the master of fire.”
KARAOKE THERAPY Once the light’s darker, it’s karaoke time. It started during Covid. I’m Japanese, so karaoke is, like, inherent in my DNA. It was therapeutic because it was Covid and we were like, “We’re going to die.” And the ritual ending song was “It’s the End of the World” by R.E.M.
STROLLING HOME By 12, people are tired. Pretty much all of us live in the East Village, the core karaoke therapy crew. So we’ll generally walk home, which is a beautiful privilege of being in Manhattan. And that walk home, I would say, is a really unspoken key part of karaoke therapy, because you just feel — there’s nothing like having neighbors and people you love and walking around in Manhattan. Being able to walk down on Broadway at the end of the day with nobody around is such a privilege, and you feel the expansive magic of New York.
MISSION COMPLETE I have my wind down command routines, where my A.I. tells me that I need to journal.
We’ll usually meditate and then go to sleep, maybe chat a little bit. Yuri tells me that I have apocalyptic topics of discussion to speak of usually before the end of the day. I just love pontificating on all these what-if future scenarios right before bed, and he’s a very sensitive artist and it probably really stresses him out.
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