31 March 2009
Artist/Architect Maya Lin: Creating Epic, Earth-Friendly Designs
Sculptures, memorials, multimedia projects incorporate natural elements
Fourth in a series of four articles
Washington — Artist and architect Maya Lin entered public life in a blaze of controversy at age 21, when she won the 1981 competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Her dramatic, unconventional design — featuring a V-shaped black granite wall engraved with the names of fallen U.S. soldiers — initially was condemned by some veterans, but today Lin’s monument is considered one of the most deeply stirring and iconic memorials in the United States.
While Lin’s name will be forever linked with that elegantly spare masterpiece — which she designed while still a Yale University architecture student — her career and interests are much more far-reaching. As a sculptor and multimedia artist, Lin creates works that signal her concern for the environment, often employing recycled and organic materials. She has designed a line of furniture for the Knoll company called “The Earth Is (Not) Flat,” and in 1994 her life was the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary film titled Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision.
Lin, now nearly 50, also continues to design public memorials. Reflecting her commitment to the environment, her designs incorporate natural elements and are integrated with the surrounding landscape. Probably the most famous of her works, after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
Born in Athens, Ohio, to Chinese immigrant parents, Lin credits her family for encouraging her creative spirit. Her father was a ceramicist and former dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts, and Lin spent much of her childhood on the school campus. “I was casting bronzes in the school foundry,” she once told an interviewer. “I was using the university as a playground.” However, “it didn’t even occur to me that I would be an artist,” she said. That changed when she entered Yale University, and architecture and art became the focus of her studies.
As a first-generation Chinese American, Lin remembers working hard to assimilate into mainstream U.S. society. “I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible,” she said. “Through my 20s and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.”
At the same time, Lin found herself increasingly alarmed about the degradation of the natural world. “How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening,” she said. “It was evident when I was a child. It’s more evident now.” Lin’s sculptures, monuments and multimedia works — no matter how different in form — are united by a single thread: All of them honor the Earth by promoting harmony with nature.
She cites various sources of inspiration, including the Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, Japanese raked-sand gardens and the American earthworks artists of the 1960s–1970s. Her latest series of large-scale sculptures appears in the exhibition Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, on display at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art through July 12. Systematic Landscapes is centered on a trio of works — 2x4 Landscape (2006), Water Line (2006) and Blue Lake Pass (2006) — that translate imposing landscape features into sculptural models.
According to the Washington Post’s David Montgomery, the new exhibition anticipates “what Lin plans as her last great memorial work: a monument to life itself on Earth, and what we’ve lost.” The project — titled What Is Missing? — will be “dedicated to extinct and endangered species, and to threatened habitats.” It will be unveiled in several phases and formats: an installation in San Francisco will open in the fall of 2009, “followed eventually by a book, a Web site, iPod content, contributions from experts, talk-back from viewers, calls to action,” Montgomery writes.
For her part, Lin said she hopes to reinvent the concept of a memorial by creating something that is located “nowhere, [yet] everywhere.”
If, as Lin states, her fifth and final memorial work is intended to break new ground, it inevitably hearkens back to her previous memorials: bold visions that reshaped the public’s notion of what a memorial could be. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s “embrace of the land, and the land’s embrace of the memorial” represent a healing process, Montgomery suggests. Similarly, the Civil Rights Memorial, dedicated in 1989, offers its own metaphor for healing: a stream of water, flowing like tears over polished granite etched with the names of U.S. citizens who gave their lives in the struggle for equality. A universal symbol of rebirth, flowing water captures the nation’s endless renewal in its people’s allegiance to freedom and justice.
Whether engaged in public or private commissions, Lin is consistent in her approach. “I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings,” she said. “That’s art to me.”
More information on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is available from the National Park Service and TheWall-USA.com.
See the Web site of the Corcoran Gallery of Art for more information on Maya Lin’s exhibition Systematic Landscapes.
