Author: Liane Wakabayashi
Inner Peace
What is the world coming to? Lego Corporation has jumped on the card-production band wagon and created its own ‘spiritual’ line of cards. They arrived in the Ninja Lego kit that my 10 year old Seiji just received as a gift. Ironically, Seiji has just renounced Battle Spirit cards. This was an expensive hobby that…
The Money Crunch
I’m writing this post in response to reading a post by a writer who is deeply upset that she can no longer pay the rent by writing. Who ever told us that we had to make our money through just writing? Who is it that demands us artists to pay the bills from our art?…
Signposts on the Journey of Life
The art on this Lesley College application form stunned me — as I opened up this page just hours after Shoko Yatabe painted this beautiful oil at Genesis art studio yesterday, December 5th. Life is a road with signboards telling us to stop, to go, to pay attention. These signboards that especially appear through art…
When the Drums Beat On
During a peaceful day of painting with Shoko Yatabe, we were so focused on making these abstract mandalalike patterns that it never occurred to us to think of drums. But life is so much about connecting the dots. In this case, downloading the oil painting photos onto the computer along with a photo of Seiji’s…
Montana’s Way of Drumming
Montana King Ramsey–my son’s drumming teacher here in Tokyo, was telling us today how he taught himself the drums. He was playing bongos in Philadelphia in the studio with some really great musicians. He watched them really closely from his stool by the bongo. He watched and listened, and followed those drum sticks until he…
The front and the back of the creative process
In front of our eyes the world stretches out as much as we allow it in. When we are leading myopic lives, attached to our smart phones, our ipads, our computers, our digital cameras, what we see is a composed moment in time, cut, edited, photoshopped, perfected, then reduced to a flash or a second…
The First Human Genesis Cards
Meet Melisa Eugenio, the first human Genesis Card. Melisa and I go back to 1994, when we both were teaching at Gakushuin, the elite high school attended by the likes of the Imperial family and where we both decided from day one that we had to play the part, wear nice clothes, buy a new…
In praise of photography
How cheap has photography become? So cheap that we don’t even have to pause and breath before snapping. We don’t have to frame, compose, breath art and life into a shot because hey, a photo is just a downloadable photo close to free except for the printer paper and ink. Now try explaining to a…
The Art of Self-Introduction
When meeting people for the first time do you get nervous? Do you feel like your whole life is being reduced to a location, a job, a family role and you don’t know what to say? We can use the Genesis Cards to break out of this rut and make self-introductions fun and truthful, especially…
Five years go by in a flash
Five years ago, the first week of November, I opened Genesis art Lounge on Nodai Dori, the busy shopping street near our home in the Kyodo area of Setagaya in Tokyo. If that sounds specific, in Tokyo you’ve got to speak very specific because the city is so vast that coordinate points are marked by…