Maya Lin crafts a legacy with art and architecture
By Tillie Fong 
| August 17, 2009 | 11:01 AM
Artist Maya Lin speaks to attendees at the National Association of Asian American Professionals in Denver last week. (RMI photo by Tillie Fong)
A mountain pass made of wood, a river of pins, a field turned into a series of waves — these are the twists of perception that artist Maya Lin adds to nature.
“A lot of time, I’m looking at things that you may not think is a physical thing,” said Lin, who is best known as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Lin was a keynote speaker at the National Association of Asian American Professionals convention in Denver last week. Although she was asked to speak about leadership, she instead discussed her artwork and her most recent projects, including her current “labor of love.”
“I don’t think an artist chooses to lead,” she said. “An artist has to stay fairly true to who they are, and maybe, if they’re lucky, people would like their work, but it’s not why they’re doing it.”
Nature is Lin’s inspiration, but she selects different ways to represent what she sees. Lin said that her intent is to let visitors experience the art by walking on top of it, under it or through it. For example, in “Systemic Landscapes,” a recent traveling show of her work, she used 2x4s to create a 14-foot-tall “hill.”
“What if you take a hill and bring it inside?” she said of the idea behind 2 X 4 Landscape. “What if you let people walk up it and they can touch the ceiling?”
Another work in the show is called Water Line, in which a large wire sculpture fills a room. The wires trace the underwater contour of the southernmost island in the world: Bouvet Island.
“We tend to pollute what we don’t see, what we can’t imagine, what we can deny,” Lin said. “So this will give you an idea of what the ocean floor looks like.”
A third installation in the show is modeled after Blue Lake Pass in Colorado, not far from where Lin’s family has spent summers for the past 14 years. The pass is re-created using 20 blocks of layered wood, which have spaces between them.
“This piece has a slight passage where you can walk through the mountain,” she said.
She also has created wall sculptures made of pins that trace the course of various waterways, including a sculpture of the Yangtze River that is on display in the American embassy in Beijing. Another of her works, Storm King Wavefield, is a reclamation of a gravel pit in Mountainville, N.Y. It consists of seven rows of 18-foot-high undulating hills, reminiscent of ocean waves, on an 11-acre field.
Environmental passion
Lin’s ties to nature extend beyond her art. An ardent conservationist — she is a trustee for the National Resources Defense Council – Lin said she is working on her fifth and final memorial, entitled What Is Missing?. The memorial will be different from the others she has created in that it will not be a single piece, nor will it sit in one place.
“I will take it wherever it wants to go,” she said. “It will be on the Web, it will be a traveling exhibit, and it can be watched simultaenously” around the world.
As she envisions it, the memorial will commemorate the loss of habitat that has led to the extinction of animals, birds, reptiles, fish and plants. Part of the project will include the sounds of nature, such as those of songbirds whose populations are declining, according to Lin.
“The sounds we all heard as children have changed,” she said. “It is diminishing.”
She said that the memorial will conclude with a description of everyday things that people can do to preserve the environment. She urged conference attendees to buy organic coffee from fair trade sources and to buy recycled paper to prevent deforestation. She also warned people to be careful what they throw away.
“Seventy percent of all garbage in the ocean originated on land,” she said.
Giving back to the community
Preserving the environment isn’t Maya Lin’s only passion.
She was trained as an architect — she received a master’s in architecture from Yale University in 1986 — and has designed several buildings, including a house in Telluride that was named a Record House by Architectural Record in 2006.
She said she believes in giving back to the community with her architectural works.
“Architecture is a profession where people who can afford to go into it,” she said, adding that most architecture students wind up not being able to make a living after they graduate, unless they work for a famous architect.
Lin said she makes it a point to do projects for nonprofit organizations, such as the Children’s Defense Fund, and Manhattanville College.
Although she is on sabbatical, there was one project she just could not turn down: designing the new space for the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City, which she described as “a labor of love.” Part of the reason was the purpose of the project.
“Their mission statement is to teach people about Chinese-American history,” she said.
Lin said she could relate to this. As a child, when she was asked where she was really from, no one would believe her when she replied, “Ohio,” since it was not a place where many Asian-Americans were found, she said.
She said she became interested in Chinese-American history when she taught a course at University of California, Berkeley, and met other Chinese-Americans who grew up in different parts of the country.
“I didn’t realize how isolated I was until I started sharing my story,” she said.
After she was interviewed for Bill Moyer’s Becoming American: The Chinese Experience, she was amazed to learn about the other stories included in the documentary.
“I didn’t know that history at all, and I realized if I didn’t know it, how many others don’t know it?” she said.
One feature of MOCA’s new space is a “journey wall” with bronze tiles bearing names of Chinese-American families, where they emigrated from in China and where they wound up in the United States. The new museum — which faces Chinatown on one side — also will have a display of portraits from different eras that will travel from one floor to the next.
“You can see the changing face of Chinese immigration throughout history,” she said.
Lin said she next plans to build a “digital” MOCA.
“It’s a way to connect and create a destination space online,” she said.
“This has been our home for a very long time and we help build this country, and especially as China grows and develops, that question of ‘Where are you from?/Where are you really from?’ became something that I really want to help answer.”
Maya Lin, Museum of Chinese in America, National Association of Asian American Professionals, Storm King Wavefield, vietnam veterans memorial, What is Missing?
