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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.

-Maya Lin

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I Probably Have Fundamentally

Maya Lin

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

We Were Unusually Brought Up; There Was No Gender Differentiation. I Was Never Thought Of As Any Less Than My Brother.

Differentiation

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.

The Only Thing That Mattered Was What You Were To Do In Life, And It Wasn't About Money. It Was About Teaching, Or Learning.

Every Memorial In Its Time Has A Different Goal.

The Role Of Art In Society Differs For Every Artist.

I'm Not In A Hurry To Do A Lot Of Projects. I Am Very Resolved In Each Project I Take On.

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.

The Definition Of A Modern Approach To War Is The Acknowledgement Of Individual Lives Lost.

I Think I've Always Had An Activist Stance, Yet At The Same Time, The Other Side Of Me - And This Is Where Some People Just Don't Get It, Or They'd Prefer It If The Work Was A Lot Uglier, A Lot Louder - I Have This Personality Where I Just Want To Put Something Out That's A Fact And Then Let You Interpret It. It's Almost As If You Might Barely Notice It, You Might Walk Right By It, But You Have To Pay Attention.

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.

If We Can't Face Death, We'll Never Overcome It. You Have To Look It Straight In The Eye. Then You Can Turn Around And Walk Back Out Into The Light.

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.

Some Of Your Teachers Are Actually Closer In Age To You Than You Think.

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.

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 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.

Our Parents Decided Not To Teach Us Chinese. It Was An Era When They Felt We Would Be Better Off If We Didn't Have That Complication.

To Fly We Have To Have Resistance.

I Always Give The Analogy Of The Earth At Night Picture, Of 7.3 Billion Of Us, Right? And Everyone Says, "well, That's Population." Well, If You Took The Entire World's Population And You Lived At The Density Of Manhattan Proper - Not A Bad Place To Live - How Much Space Do 7.3 Billion People Take Up? The State Of Colorado. At Which Point I End My Lectures, Because I Want You To Be Thinking ... Is This Really A Question Of Population, Or Is This A Question Of Land Use And Resource Consumption? And Let's Face It, The Top 1.3 Billion Of Us Are Doing All The Damage. Sorry.

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.

Ok, It Was Black, It Was Below Grade, I Was Female, Asian American, Young, Too Young To Have Served. Yet I Think None Of The Opposition In That Sense Hurt Me.

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.

It's Funny, As You Live Through Something You're Not Aware Of It.

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.

If You Don't Remember History Accurately, How Can You Learn?

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.

We Know Under Nebraska There Is An Underground Aquifer That Is Probably Underneath The Whole State, But What Form Does It Take? I Kind Of Want To Focus On That, For Almost Political Means, Because We Keep Digging More Wells. We're Not Replenishing, And We're Having A Crisis In Water Around The World. But How Do You Visualize It? I Don't Know, So I Know What I Want To Study.

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.

You Couldn't Put Me In A Social Group Setting. I'm Probably A Terrible Anarchist Deep Down.

For The Most Part Things Never Get Built The Way They Were Drawn.

To Me, The American Dream Is Being Able To Follow Your Own Personal Calling. To Be Able To Do What You Want To Do Is Incredible Freedom.

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.

Nothing Is Ever Guaranteed, And All That Came Before Doesn't Predicate What You Might Do Next.

I Didn't Have Anyone To Play With So I Made Up My Own World.

You Really Can't Function As A Celebrity. Entertainers Are Celebrities. I'm An Architect. I'm An Artist. I Make Things.

I Can't Shout Out, "do This." I Don't Want To Be Prescriptive. I Want To Give You Facts, And That's The Way I've Always Operated, Whether It's A Historical Fact Or A Scientific Fact, And Then You Actually Have To Connect It In Your Brain.

I Loved Logic, Math, Computer Programming. I Loved Systems And Logic Approaches. And So I Just Figured Architecture Is This Perfect Combination.

To Fly, We Have To Have Resistance. It's All About Turbulence. Reacting To Images Of Wave Patterns In Fluid Motion.

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.

Math, It's A Puzzle To Me. I Love Figuring Out Puzzles.

To Fly, We Must Have Resistance.

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.

Competitions Are What You Do As A Good Exercise.

My Parents Are Both College Professors, And It Made Me Want To Question Authority, Standards And Traditions.

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.

It Terrified Me To Have An Idea That Was Solely Mine To Be No Longer A Part Of My Mind, But Totally Public.

I Do Think The Smaller-scale Studio Works Have That Incredible Love Of Data Crunching, Whereas I Would Say The Large-scale Earthworks Tend To Be Much More Stripped-down. With The Mappings, As Connected As They Are To A Much More Analytical Idea, What's A Map? And Can I Make A Map About Time? I Think The First Time Was Hurricane Sandy, The Flood Plane; A Moment In Time, But Indelibly Marked On Any Of Us Who Were In The City. Mapping Time Is Something That I'm Really Interested In.

It's Only In Hindsight That You Realize What Indeed Your Childhood Was Really Like.

My Grandfather, On My Father's Side, Helped To Draft One Of The First Constitutions Of China. He Was A Fairly Well-known Scholar.

Sometimes I Think Creativity Is Magic; It's Not A Matter Of Finding An Idea, But Allowing The Idea To Find You.

I Do Not Think You Can Find A Reason For Everything You Make.

Reason For Everything

I Like To Think Of My Work As Creating A Private Conversation With Each Person, No Matter How Public Each Work Is And No Matter How Many People Are Present

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.

You Have To Let The Viewers Come Away With Their Own Conclusions. If You Dictate What They Should Think, You've Lost It.

All My Work Is Much More Peaceful Than I Am.

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.

Our Lives Are Given Meaning By Our Actions-accomplishments Made While We Are "here" That Extend Beyond Our Own Time.

I'm As Much Interested In The Form-making As Well As Getting You To Think About What We're Doing To The World Around Us.

An Artist Fights To Retain The Integrity Of A Work So That It Remains A Strong, Clear Vision. Art Is And Should Be The Act Of An Individual Willing To Say Something New, Something Not Quite Familiar.

When I Was Very Little, We Would Get Letters From China, In Chinese, And They' Be Censored. We Were A Very Insular Little Family.

Warmth Isn't What Minimalists Are Thought To Have.

How We Are Using Up Our Home, How We Are Living And Polluting The Planet Is Frightening. It Was Evident When I Was A Child. It's More Evident Now.

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.

I Think I Needed To Really Move Past My First Public Work As Memorialist, And Be Equally Balanced. It's A Bit Unusual, To Be Working Between The Architecture, The Art, And What I Would Say Is A Synthesis, The Memorials - They're Problem Solving, But It's Very Symbolic. You Get This Triangle; I Need To Be Balanced With Those Three. They're All Equally A Part Of Who I Am. I Love How Different They Are, And Yet They're Coming Out The Same Thing, Whatever It Is.

I Cannot Force A Design; I Do Not See This Process As Being Under My Conscious Control.

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 Really Enjoyed Hanging Out With Some Of The Teachers. This One Chemistry Teacher, She Liked Hanging Out. I Liked Making Explosives. We Would Stay After School And Blow Things Up.

If We Forget What Used To Be, Then We’ve Lost An Ability To Really Be Sensitive To Our Surroundings.

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.

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.

It Was A Requirement By The Veterans To List The 57,000 Names. We're Reaching A Time That We'll Acknowledge The Individual In A War On A National Level.

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.

I Went Through Withdrawal When I Got Out Of Graduate School. It's What You Learn, What You Think. That's All That Counts.

Sometimes You Have To Stop Thinking. Sometimes You Shut Down Completely. I Think That's True In Any Creative Field.

I Try To Give People A Different Way Of Looking At Their Surroundings. That's Art To Me.

Some Artists Want To Confront. Some Want To Invoke Thought. They're All Necessary And They're All Valid.

War Is Not Just A Victory Or Loss ... People Die.

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