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Maya Lin Quotes
born 1959 United States
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.
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12 quotes
I have fought very, very hard to get past being known as the Monument Maker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.