It was not exactly a subtle endeavour, but it was certainly less heavy-handed than Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014) project, which carted massive hunks of glacial ice into public spaces and let them melt. This ecological cemetery stood for six months, slowly wasting away as the season changed. It involved installing 49 Atlantic white cedar trees that had been killed by climate change-induced saltwater inundation (in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey) upright in the green space. Pull those pins, and the map disappears.ĭeath haunted Lin’s Ghost Forest installation in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park in 2021. There is a utopian tone to this exercise – the all-seeing cartographer’s belief that vast expanses can be mapped, and thus grasped in some way – but a certain fragility or even ephemerality defines much of her art. In her borderless models, Lin nudges viewers to step back and marvel at natural systems that operate across hundreds and hundreds of miles. Those waterways cross fraught political boundaries, which are absent in Lin’s works, and they have developed on a timescale beyond human memory. Nature Knows No Boundaries, 2023 (installation view, Pace Gallery, Seoul) Courtesy Pace Gallery, Seoul On another wall, thin branches of recycled silver showed the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates, a similar spread of craggy lines ( Silver Tigris & Euphrates Watershed, 2022). It suggested a closeup of veins and capillaries, a frozen burst of lightning or even a faraway galaxy. Thousands of tiny steel pins dotted a roughly 3-by-2m expanse of wall, meticulously charting Korea’s Imjin and Han rivers and their many tributaries ( Pin Gang – Imjin and Han, 2022). In a solo exhibition at Pace gallery in the South Korean capital that ran into March, Lin presented a few works that map rivers, a recurring practice for her. They tend to be restrained – her art often involves only a single material – and rooted in a functional logic, while exuding a beauty that is tinged by melancholy. What holds those legs together? Classic Lin pieces evince a quiet reverence for the natural world and an awareness of deep history. She sees her work “as a tripod”, she said during a talk in February at Hongik University in Seoul, the three legs being art, architecture and memorials (or “memory works”, as she has also termed them). Now sixty-three and based in New York, she has carved out for herself something of a sui generis position in the US cultural landscape by moving between different but related roles, uniting different disciplines. In the intervening 40 years, Lin has of course kept working. It is easy to picture Fox News host Tucker Carlson oozing condescension and indignation, and Republican officeholders rushing to line up behind him. She faced racist attacks at the time, and had to defend her plan before Congress, but public discourse in the US has curdled a great deal since then. If the process were to be repeated now, it is hard to be confident that Lin would be able to see her commission through to construction. Maya Lin with the final design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, presented in Washington, dc, in May 1981, in the company of memorial fund and project directors This is an unspectacular monument – beneath the ground but exposed to light, mournful but not sepulchral. It was the only entry in the top ten to have been built in the past half-century, and even more importantly, it was the only selection that could be classified as an example of minimalism, and an unusual strain of minimalism at that. When the American Institute of Architects published a survey of ‘America’s Favorite Architecture’ in 2007, it came in at number ten. It is not universally adored, but it is beloved. They use crayons and pencils to rub names onto paper. Walking down its path, people grow quiet. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become one of the great sacred spaces in the United States. Maya Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, faces fervent opposition to her spare design – two long walls gliding into the land, bearing the names of the American dead – but in 1982 it is installed on the National Mall, and it makes her a star. The American sees her work as founded on a mix of art, architecture and the creation of memorials, all of which she uses to honour the past and reshape the futureĬould it happen today, in the political climate of 2023 America? As the famous story goes, in 1981, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate submits a highly unconventional proposal for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and in a blind competition against more than 1,400 other entries, she wins.
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