Profiles for APAHM: Maya Lin
Photo by Matt Furman for The Wall Street Journal
Maya Lin is an award-winning artist, architect and designer. She is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that stands in Washington D.C. Years later, Maya has also gained recognition for her sculpture work and outdoor installations that combine themes of nature, landscape, and the environment.
Born in 1959 to two Chinese immigrants, Maya spent her childhood and youth growing up in Athens, Ohio. Her parents, once part of the scholarly, intellectual elite in China, had fled to the US fearing persecution by the Communist Regime. Maya later noted that her upbringing was rather unlike the stereotypical Chinese-American childhood. Neither she nor her older brother learned Chinese; instead her parents hoped they would assimilate. Maya struggled with her identity throughout her youth, feeling out of place in Ohio and yet uncomfortable amongst fellow Asian Americans. It was only later into adulthood, as her parents began to talk more of their lives before America and family history, that she gained a greater connection to her heritage.
A sketch from Maya’s contest submission.
It was while she was a senior at Yale that Maya won an anonymous, nationwide competition for the design of the Vietnam War Memorial. Though now one of the capitol’s most iconic monuments, the memorial was initially a point of controversy for its unconventional design and Maya’s own background at the time, being both of Asian ethnicity and only an undergrad college student. Maya was forced to defend her design before Congress while still attending college. Nevertheless, the memorial was finally completed and opened to the public in 1982, and today draws huge crowds of visitors and tourists.
Following her work on the Vietnam Memorial, Maya continued her career as an artist and architect. She designed another memorial in 1989, this time in honor of the civil rights movement. From the 1990s onwards, Maya turned away from memorials and began to develop herself as a sculptor, architect, and designer. Many of her art installations and sculptures have been inspired by elements from nature, such as Groundswell (1993), The Wave Field (1995), and Water Line (2006). Maya’s work also advocates for environmentalism, most notably with her What is Missing? Project. Begun in 2009, it is an ongoing project that highlights the threat to biodiversity and the relationship between man and nature.
Maya’s work has inspired many architects and artists to reimagine the relationship between people and spaces. In particular, her thoughtful and reflective work on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now an iconic masterpiece of American design and highly influential on the field of public art. Maya will no doubt continue to evolve and reinterpret her work for years to come.