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Page 1 of 2 From the Vietnam Memorial to Her New Topographical Installations at the Henry, Maya Lin Has Permanently Altered the Landscape—and the Way We Look at It.
 Photo by Cheung Ching Ming. “As I walked on it for the first time,” she says, “all I could think was, wow, I’d really like to push this—to make this curve, this hill, something extremely tall, so it could actually get you to a different relationship to the ceiling.” When Lin returned to her studio, she pushed it, and the result is 2X4 Landscape—an imposing hill made of thousands of upright two-by-fours that’s currently being assembled in a warehouse in South Lake Union. In mid-April it will move to the Henry Art Gallery, becoming one of three large-scale installations in Lin’s first major museum exhibition since 1998. “Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes” is a big-time show by a big-time artist—someone who knows, as the grim joke goes, what the first sentence of her obituary will say. In 1981, while an undergraduate at Yale, Lin won a national competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Her entry—a chevron-shaped wall of black granite inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 American servicemen and women killed in Vietnam, which seems to emerge from and disappear into the earth—is now the most visited memorial in the United States.  Visitors will view a wire replica of an undersea topography from both above and below. Photos courtesy of Maya Lin Studio.  Lin’s most recognized work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Photo by Terry Adams, courtesy of the National Park Service.
2X4 Landscape, for example, requires 2,800 square feet of uninterrupted space. It is composed of nearly 70,000 boards that range in height from a few inches to nine-and-a-half feet. When regarded from some angles, it appears to be a hill. But one of its faces is so steep that in profile it looks like something much more fluid and, potentially, threatening—a cresting wave. Both forms are natural, as is the material, but because the boards are cut to different lengths and the overall surface has not been sanded down, the piece’s texture is decidedly inorganic. It appears to be pixelated. “Something in the piece is always contradicting itself,” Lin says. “I figured out that if I made it more pixelated, it would seem to be growing and emerging—an inorganic organic process.” The Henry, with its viewing balconies, double-high ceilings and large, column-free spaces, is one of only a handful of galleries in the country that can accommodate “Systematic Landscapes,” says Director Richard Andrews. Along with 2X4 Landscape, the exhibition includes a giant, suspended wire-frame replica of an undersea topography that Lin discovered in an atlas, which visitors will be invited to view from both above and below; and a particle-board rendering, in cross-sections, of a mountain range that’s visible from Lin’s summer home in Colorado. Another of her fixations, she says, is what lies beneath the surfaces of familiar things. It’s a challenging scale at which to make art, because the finished works exist only in her mind until the day they’re installed. Lin tends to keep a close eye on the construction process, making modifications along the way. But she doesn’t worry too much about producing pieces that work in theory and fail in practice, she says. “I really do trust my eye in relation to the models.”
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