Maya Lin

Maya Ying Lin (Chinese: 林璎) (born October 5, 1959) is an American designer and sculptor. In 1981, while an undergraduate at Yale University, she achieved national recognition when she won a national design competition for the planned Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin has designed numerous memorials, public and private buildings, landscapes, and sculptures. Although best known for historical memorials, she is also known for environmentally themed works, which often address environmental decline.

Quotes

 * Everything you make is being made by every single experience you've ever had in your whole life, and on top of that, things you were born with. I think your personality comes out. There's no way of really saying: "If A, then B, or A plus B equals C in creativity." The true strength of the creative arts is that you allow yourself to think about something. Then how it finds its way in your mind to the surface through your hands to-- whether it's paint or sculpture-- is intuited. I think there's reason to it. But could you extrapolate? Could you actually formulate a mathematical theorem? Absolutely not.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 1) in PBS (2003)


 * Another adage in art is: you're a child and then you become an adult. You're always trying to regain that pure, almost empathetic response that you have when you're a child. It doesn't come with a lot of baggage. You're not worried about, "Oh, what are you thinking here, here, here?" You just respond in certain ways. I think sometimes: Can you think like a child? We're always trying to regain that. I almost make things imagining a child will experience them.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 1) in PBS (2003)


 * Now, your great fear in art is that it's never guaranteed you're going to get that next idea. And there's always the fear that the idea you just made that you really, really love, you'll never be able to do it again.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 1) in PBS (2003)


 * I try to understand the "why" of a project before it's a "what." And this might be more pertinent to some of my memorial projects. Memorials are a hybrid between art and architecture because they have a function.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 1) in PBS (2003)


 * The Vietnam War was much more in the main news. I think the rioting was. But I think a lot of the facts hadn't been written into the textbooks because it was current news. From a child's point of view, you're not focusing on the daily news the same way. Anyway, I was stunned at how there was this part of American history. I know now it's absolutely covered in textbooks. But could I offer something out as an information table that would give people a brief glimpse of that era the way I had been, after having looked at this material, been given a glimpse? And of course, the idea is, you look at this. You'll want to study it more. Because the one thing about sculptures, the one thing about memorials is: I can draw you in. I can make you think for 15 minutes, whatever, then it's really about where you go after that.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 1) in PBS (2003)


 * I value writing. I respect it. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I'm done I am unbelievably just at peace. If you think about art as being able to share your thoughts with another, writing is totally pure.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 5) in PBS (2003)


 * I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth. I imagine taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up and the initial violence and pain that in time would heal. The grass would grow back, but the initial cut would remain a pure, flat surface in the earth with a polished mirrored surfaced, much like the surface on a geode when you cut it and polish the edge. The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial. There was no need to embellish the design further. The people and their names would allow everyone to respond and remember. It would be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 5) in PBS (2003)


 * I had been blessed that racism had never really entered into my realm. I get to Denmark and ironically I think they thought I was a Greenlander at times. An eskimo. Because if I get a suntan, I change through different races. Some people think I'm American Indian. When I'm in Mexico, I blend.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 5) in PBS (2003)


 * If you ever tried to analyze its shape, it's one of the most complex forms. Think about it, it's every compound curve. There's nothing symmetrical about it. It's about looking at something again and then appreciating it. I mean, nature, is so complex.
 * "Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 5) in PBS (2003)


 * I’ve always been pretty fixated on water. Maybe it’s because it exists in multiple states, and you can never understand it in nature as a fixed moment in time.
 * "Artists at Work: Maya Lin" in Interview Magazine (10 August 2017)


 * I think I’ve always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me—and this is where some people just don’t get it, or they’d prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder—I have this personality where I just want to put something out that’s a fact and then let you interpret it. It’s almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention.
 * "Artists at Work: Maya Lin" in Interview Magazine (10 August 2017)


 * It’s a bit unusual, as you said, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials—they’re problem solving, but it’s very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They’re all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they’re coming out the same thing, whatever it is.
 * "Artists at Work: Maya Lin" in Interview Magazine (10 August 2017)


 * I leave it up to the viewers. If it’s in a museum, if it’s in a gallery, usually I am going to point out something about a river right below your feet or right outside your window. I’m not going to scream it out. If you get a little curious, you can find a little bit more. At times my works are maybe to a fault subtle. For public works, maybe you won’t even notice I was here. I’m not trying to defeat or conquer nature.
 * "Maya Lin on Art, Architecture, Landscape and Memory" in Bloomberg (19 November 2022)


 * I think art is different. I think you have to be who you are. My art happens to be very integrally linked with my environmental concerns. But to be an artist, you have to be true to who you are.
 * "Maya Lin on Art, Architecture, Landscape and Memory" in Bloomberg (19 November 2022)


 * It took a lot to understand and to thread a path that would allow me to develop in architecture, and develop my voice there, develop my voice in art. I wasn’t abandoning what I would call my interest in history and memory.
 * "Maya Lin on Art, Architecture, Landscape and Memory" in Bloomberg (19 November 2022)


 * I tend to make models of a lot of my pieces. I end up making models, and the models get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I call it the Christmas tree syndrome. You buy a Christmas tree outdoors, you think it’s too small, then you bring it inside and you have to lop two feet off because it’s way too big. If you’re working out of doors, you have to test actual scale, with a paper cutout, with a maquette at full scale, because you need it to feel intimate like a dining table. You have to scale it up just enough so that it will still feel intimate — so it won’t jump to monumental in scale. It has to be bigger than it would be inside because then it would get dwarfed. You can only do that by actually mocking it up.
 * "Maya Lin on Art, Architecture, Landscape and Memory" in Bloomberg (19 November 2022)


 * There are a couple of things out there that I really want to do. I’ll tell you one. I want to work in a landfill. I love things that involve adaptive reuse of really degraded places. The sad thing about our current landfills are, you can’t dig a hole into them, because heaven forbid, there’s all this toxic stuff in there. It’s not just that I want to work in a landfill. I would like to help rethink what a landfill could be. What if we didn’t put anything toxic in? What if we composted all our organic matter? So then it wouldn’t be dangerous to plant a tree in it, you wouldn’t have to cap it because you think there’s so much poison in there. What if we could recycle all our rare-earth metals and minerals? It’s a big ask. That’s something I want to do in my lifetime.
 * "Maya Lin on Art, Architecture, Landscape and Memory" in Bloomberg (19 November 2022)


 * Every bowl we ate off was something he made by hand: stonewares connected to nature and natural colors and materials. And so I think our everyday lives was imbued with this very clean, modern, but very warm aesthetic, and that very much influenced me.
 * "The Private World of the Public Artist Maya Lin" in Smithsonian Magazine (22 December 2022)


 * In art, I get to walk into my head and do whatever I want to do, to free up completely. That goes back to my roots in Athens, Ohio, my roots in nature and my feelings of connections to the environment, that everything is coalesced around being inspired by the natural world and reflecting that beauty out to others.
 * "The Private World of the Public Artist Maya Lin" in Smithsonian Magazine (22 December 2022.


 * I have fought very, very hard to get past being known as the Monument Maker.
 * "Maya Lin, The Reluctant Memorialist" in The New Yorker (30 June 2022)


 * By second or third grade, I was doing my own thing. I still resent being told what to do in any way, shape, or form. I’m sure it’s clinical.
 * "Maya Lin, The Reluctant Memorialist" in The New Yorker (30 June 2022)


 * I would hope that artists can offer a different viewpoint, a different way of seeing the exact same data points, but maybe, because we can think a little bit outside of the norm, we can offer a new way of looking at it.
 * "Q. & A. | Maya Lin on Saving the Planet Through Art" in The New York Times Magazine (3 July 2014)


 * I think art is personal to each artist, and so to me it is what my art always has been about. But that’s my choice as an artist. I don’t believe art necessarily has to be any one thing. In fact, if we all felt inclined to have to do that, I think it would be a disaster for art.
 * "Q. & A. | Maya Lin on Saving the Planet Through Art" in The New York Times Magazine (3 July 2014)

Quotes about Maya Lin

 * She’s just amazing, when you think about what she has done, the work she quietly does in her way. She doesn’t seek attention, but at the same time, people come to her because they know that she will take that opportunity and the gifts, the talent she has and from what I’ve seen, and we all see, that it’ll be remarkable.
 * Freida Lee Mock, director of the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,"The Private World of the Public Artist Maya Lin" in Smithsonian Magazine (22 December 2022)


 * The response is where Lin starts her work as a designer. She creates, essentially, backward. There is no image in her head, only an imagined feeling. Often, she writes an essay explaining what the piece is supposed to do to the people who encounter it. She says that the form just comes to her, sometimes months later, fully developed, an egg that shows up on the doorstep one day. She rarely tinkers with it. She is, in other words, an artist of a rather pure and intuitive type.
 * Louis Menand, "Maya Lin, The Reluctant Memorialist" in The New Yorker (30 June 2022)