Maya Lin: Translating Nature Through Art

©2008 by Annabelle A. Udo
(unedited version from AsianWeek - week of October 31, 2008)

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The best way to experience Systematic Landscapes, the latest art installation by celebrated artist and sculptor Maya Lin, is to turn off the cell phone, turn on the senses, and take a slow walk through space and time. Best known for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington D.C., Lin brings to San Francisco’s De Young Museum three large-scale environment installation pieces that continues her interest in exploring the shifting landscape amidst the zeitgeist of global chaos.

Lin proclaims to be a committed environmentalist and through her work encourages people to observe an aging world with fresh eyes. "I do not believe in any way about preaching through my art," she said, "but I am asking you to take a different, longer look at the land. When we’re little, we are looking at things for the first time. As we grow older, we stop paying attention. So, if I could get you to take pause, maybe you’ll start seeing things again."

Plopped smack dab in De Young’s Wilsey Court, it is hard to miss "2x4 Landscape", one of three large-scale installations that features more than 60,000 boards set on end creating a vast hill that peaks at 10-feet. According to John Buchanan, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, "It took more than 2 ½ weeks to install and our visiting public during that time was enchanted and enthralled with how ‘2x4 Landscape’ was actualized."

"It is a drawing where the shadows are equal in weight to the piece," is how Lin describes "Water Line", a graceful wire frame, 3-dimensional drawing suspended in space and the second of her large-scale pieces. Representing Lin’s fascination with the subterranean world, "Water Line" captures the terrain of Bouvet Island, a remote island located in the southernmost point of the Atlantic Ocean. Interestingly, a similar piece called "Where the Land Meets the Sea", can be seen hanging across the way at the re-opened California Academy of Sciences also in Golden Gate Park, which features a tubular wire sculpture which Lin mentioned had to be engineered in a way "that wasn’t too heavy or too bulky but rather it had to feel as if I hand-drew it in space."

"Blue Lake Pass", the last of Lin's trio of large-scale works represents the rugged southwestern mountain range in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Her topographic translation is comprised of chunks of stacked particle board that have been segmented and pulled apart to create landscape strata through which the visitor can walk-through and experience a different relationship to the land.

Systematic Landscapes, which essentially is Lin's concept of capturing nature’s geographic features and confining it all into a museum space, also includes a series of sculptures based on the water volumes of various inland seas; plaster reliefs of imagined landscapes that are embedded directly into gallery walls; and a series of landscape drawings which are a cartographer's delight as she takes inspiration from obsolete atlases and modifies them to represent alternative topographies.

Having already traveled to St. Louis, Seattle, and San Diego, Systematic Landscapes will depart San Francisco next year and head to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. While here in San Francisco, Lin’s "Pin River" shapeshifts into the sinuous path that the Tuolumne River takes through Hetch Hetchy Valley. "Pin River" addresses Lin's interest in how man-made lakes and dams have seriously changed and altered rivers by expressing this through a synergy of thousands of straight, stainless steel pins stuck into the wall creating a bristle of shadows that play off the gallery lighting.

To complement this piece, Lin has created limited edition, 34" x 10" silver-cast sculptures of the Tuolomne River and will be for sale at the museum with proceeds going to the De Young.

“Systematic Landscapes” will be at the De Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park through January 18, 2009. For more information visit www.deyoungmuseum.org.