Maya Lin

If you are visiting the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington D.C., you can’t resist the power of grief and healing that the memorial wall is expressing. This was designed by Maya Lin in 1981, when she was an undergraduate student at Yale.

Lin was born in Athens Ohio to a Chinese immigrant family. Her parents are both faculties in Ohio University. She is the niece of Lin Huiyin, the first female architect of modern China. During her young age, she was interested in exploring the relationship between human and nature, which then became a major theme of her design.

Lin’s victory for the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial design had drawn controversies in 1981, its untraditional design, Lin's Asian ethnicity and her lack of professional experience were all critics targeted on. Lin defended her design in the US congress who made the decision of building another three-soldier sculpture right next to the memorial wall. Today, the memorial wall has become the most important pilgrimage for relatives and friends of the dead soldiers. And is ranked No.10 of America’s Favorite Architecture according to the poll from American Institute of Architects.

Since then, she has continued her acclaimed work in art and architecture and often uses her projects to highlight environmental issues such as loss of biodiversity (What is Missing?) and climate change (Ghost Forest).

Maya was featured in the documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1995. “Her work has profoundly changed the way we experience things, creating works that have touched us in a manner unprecedented in contemporary art” (Academy of Achievement). In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Maya with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.