Quote

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.

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
Giving
Specific
Needs
Project
Writing
Projects
Materiality
Trying
Begin
Verbally
Understand
Artwork
Form
Imagining
Without
Solid
Need
Describe

More quotes by 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.
Maya Lin
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To fly we have to have resistance.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.
Maya Lin
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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
Maya Lin
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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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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
Maya Lin
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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Maya Lin
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A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.
Maya Lin
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Sometimes I think creativity is magic it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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To fly, we must have resistance.
Maya Lin
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya Lin
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
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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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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
Maya Lin