About Maya Lin: Maya Ying Lin is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in sculpture and landscape art. She first came to fame at the age of 21 as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
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.
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.
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.
I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
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 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.
The role of art in society differs for every artist.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.
To fly we have to have resistance.
It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.
Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.
I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.
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.
I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.
I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class.
My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.
