By Sarah Wang | Staff Writer
Artist, designer and environmentalist Maya Lin presented “An Afternoon with Maya Lin: The Humanities at the Intersection of Art and Architecture” on Monday in the Cashion Academic Center. She lectured on how she interprets the natural world through the lens of history, politics and culture.
With honorary doctorates from Yale and Harvard, Lin is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Design Award.
According to her Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities website, her installations, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, are “a part of the land and merge physical and psychological environments to create a new way of seeing the world around us.”
Lin opened with a discussion on her architectural works, including “Decoding the Tree of Life” — a site-specific installation at a 4,050-foot-high atrium commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania Health System. She said she decided to use a DNA combination to present the tree because so much of its analysis is going into cancer research today.
Another project Lin talked about is the building for the Museum of Chinese in America in downtown Manhattan. She said the idea behind it was a compilation of a vertical landscape painting, a Chinese puzzle called Tangram and bronze-colored vessels in Chinese.
“The work bridges the cultural divide between traditional Chinatown and the contemporary art worlds of SoHo and NoLIta,” Lin’s studio website reads.
Lin said the history of the original building is what people remember and are connected to. She said she wants to build off the foundation with any renovations she is a part of.
“There’s always a play with old and new to make sure there’s an equal balance,” Lin said. “So it doesn’t feel like you’re having a fight.”
Lin then discussed her memorial called “What Is Missing?” She said the project exists formally as both permanent sculptures and temporary media exhibits; however, it also exists virtually as a website, which acts as a nexus for the entire project.
Lin said “What Is Missing?” focuses on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear during this period of time if nothing is done to protect them. She also said it is about nature and people’s relationship to it, presenting new ways to see a different outcome for the planet.
“Even though I work with memory and loss, they’ve all been about hope,” Lin said.
Dr. Heidi J. Hornik, professor of art history, said Lin was able to give the audience art, architecture and environmental issues to think about.
“Lin has found way to integrate memorials into present day by extension into environmental concerns,” Hornik said. “As an artist [and] as a visual thinker especially, she is able to create monuments and works of arts on the landscape that reiterate her thoughts and her worries about the planet.”
Dr. Xin Wang, associate professor of Chinese, said the Chinese landscape paintings, which Lin presented as an inspiration to her Museum of Chinese in America project, demonstrated Lin’s idea that art transcends borders and cultures.
Wang also said Lin is able to reflect on the role art plays in society through her work.
“It is important [to think about] how art negotiates the past and contemporary societies,” Wang said. “As Lin mentions how art is a reflection of our times, she also tries to emphasize how art can help us to remember the past.”
