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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

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
Approach
Modern
Lives
Individual
War
Lost
Acknowledgement
Artist
Definition
Definitions

More quotes by Maya Lin

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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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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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To fly, we must have resistance.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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We were unusually brought up there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
Maya Lin
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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.
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.
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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.
Maya Lin
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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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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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I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.
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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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.
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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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.
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
Maya Lin