Maya Lin
34 quotes
Biography
Maya Ying Lin is an American architect, designer, and sculptor. Born in Athens, Ohio, to Chinese immigrants, she attended Yale University to study architecture.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think."
"I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me."
"I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me."
"Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have."
"Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist."
"I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. 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."
"I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them."
"The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical."
"In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures."
"I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination."
"Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture."
"When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business."
"My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground."
"If we can't face death, we'll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light."
"When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family."
"To me, the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom."
"It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it."
"How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now."
"The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning."
"You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition."
"I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was."
"I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them."