Podcast #114: Maya Lin on Memorializing What Is Missing

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
May 31, 2016

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Artist Maya Lin's work is big, from large-scale environmental installments to memorials to architectural projects. Her monograph Maya Lin: Topologies was published by Rizzoli in 2015. This week for the New York Public Library Podcast we're proud to present Maya Lin discussing memorials, What Is Missing, and building environments.

Paul Holdengräber and Maya Lin

Paul Holdengräber and Maya Lin LIVE from the NYPL

Lin's most recent project is an expansive one spanning from online spaces to actual spaces, digitally and as a physical book. It address the loss of biodiversity and habitats. She described it as a multimedia memorial for a shrinking world:

"The idea of What Is Missing is what if you could make a memorial that could be in as many places as it was invited in? It could exist as temporary installations, permanent installations, it exists as a website, whatismissing.net, it will exist as a virtual and a physical book, and to me it’s free as long as you share it... another thing I thought that would be very important for me with What Is Missing is to act as a frame where we’re quoting from all the NGOs, all the scientific groups, and what you begin to see is to see this group as a family and to see their gains and their losses."

This interest in memorials dates back to Lin's days as an undergraduate at Yale University. There she created her Vietnam Veteran's Memorial:

"To me though in a very funny way the most moving memorials, whether it’s the memorials to the missing in World War I that you brought up or what you just read, it’s all about absence, and it’s about there is an impossibility you absolutely can’t attain. So this is—this memorial, which is Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing in Thiepval, France, is very directly connected to my design for the Vietnam Memorial, not so much formally, but twofold... [W]ritten on the white stone are the names of I think over a hundred thousand soldiers killed in one battle, over I think it was a three-day period, the Battle of the Somme, and they’re all missing. Why are they missing? Because there are no dog tags. So I had—you know, everyone knows this story. I designed the memorial, Vietnam memorial, as a class project, in the class project as a senior at Yale you have an option, you can set up your own class, so seven of us said, 'we’re interested in funereal architecture.' The design we did, right before we decided, 'oh, let’s design the Vietnam memorial, there’s a competition, that’s a great way to end the school.' The assignment was to design a memorial to World War III, and so I had started studying all about memorials, so you get back into the plot about the famous versus the missing or the individual."

With training as an architect, Lin is particularly attuned to the way that space is experienced. She spoke about atlases as a starting point for artistic creation:

"I would say about twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, I started buying up used atlases, and what I love is you follow, I follow with an Xacto blade landscape terrains and up until you get to the United States, ways in which we could measure by hubris, just measure a square, cities states territories followed more natural boundaries, so the idea is once I start drawing in, you’re kind of following both natural borders and political borders, and then I’m just making a landscape within, hidden away in atlases, again, and then this is a pin, these are pin rivers of waterways, this is at the U.S. Consulate in Beijing, and if you go back one, it is the Yangtze River. So I like looking and grounding people in what is literally right under their feet, I also love focusing on rivers, because we tend to again we’re incredibly territorial, we see what we know, and we know along a river where we live, maybe if someone’s polluting upstream, we’ll think about what’s up there, we don’t tend to worry about what’s downstream from us, so a lot of these rivers and waterways are beginning to get you to see these rivers as unified wholes."

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