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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.

Maya Lin

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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Much
Possible
Decidedly
Years
American
Eastern
Life
Artist
Wanting
Art
Architecture
Become
Began
Character
Spent
Firsts
Aware
First
Probably

More quotes by Maya Lin

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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
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You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.
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I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
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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.
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
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I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.
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I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.
Maya Lin
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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.
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You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
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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.
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
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I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
Maya Lin
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin