She has good reason to. She may, in fact, be the best living judge of how an artwork that exists only in miniature will play at full size. The resounding success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial makes it easy to forget what a controversy it created in 1981. Some veterans deeply resented the fact that an artist so young (and so Asian) had won the competition. Virtually every aspect of Lin’s design—its shape, its blackness, its subtlety, and its lack of familiar symbols, such as bronze figures or an American flag—came in for criticism. Editorialists called it “an Orwellian glop,” “an open urinal” and “a black gash of shame.” A loose coalition of pundits and politicians, including Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and Representative Henry Hyde, demanded that it be scrapped.

Landscape3 depicts a mountain range sliced into sections. Photo courtesy of Maya Lin Studio.

Yet Lin never doubted the rightness of her design—a self-certainty she now attributes to her youth. She knew that people would be moved by the monument. She knew they would cry. She knew they would find it impossible not to touch the carved names. And she knew that only black granite would do.

“I think what caught people unawares,” says Andrews, “was the aspect of the polished stone that reflects the living in the names of the dead. Nobody had caught that in the drawings, or it certainly hadn’t been much talked about. But it was in Maya’s mind. I think there was something about the ultimate shape and form and materials of the work that was stunning, on a national level—as in being stunned.”

“Systematic Landscapes,” Andrews says, is a major show that grew out of a modest proposal. About four years ago, he attended an early briefing on the Confluence Project—Lin’s largest public monument to date. “And I was thinking to myself, ‘Gosh, it would be great to bring some of these models and drawings to Seattle audiences,’” he says. After a few conversations with Lin, however, he realized she had something much bigger in mind, and that he, unlike many museum directors, had the space for it.

From some angles, 2X4 Landscape appears to be a hill. From others, a wave.

Another happy coincidence is that Lin has a personal connection to the UW. It’s where her parents met, and where she spent a small part of her childhood. In the mid-1950s, Julia Chang and Henry Huan Lin were both graduate students at the University and recent refugees from communist China (Julia had been smuggled out of Shanghai on a junk boat with $20 sewn into the collar of her coat). They fell in love, married and moved to Athens, Ohio, home of the University of Ohio, where Henry had accepted a teaching position in the ceramics department. In 1964, Julia took her two young children back to Seattle for a year to finish her Ph.D.

Maya says she doesn’t remember much about that year, beyond a few impressions—“The graduate student housing at that time was behind the trash dump, and it smelled interesting,” she says. “And I remember seagulls. Millions of seagulls.” Returning to the UW feels more like a homecoming to her mother—whom she plans on bringing to the Henry opening—than it does to her, Lin says. But a past visit to the University did yield the unexpected pleasure of meeting people who still remembered her father.

“My dad passed away in ’89,” she says, “and I completely adored him. To run into people who had been his students or colleagues in the ’50s, to have them come up to me and say, ‘I knew your dad’—that kind of connection has an incredible importance to me.”

Eric McHenry is the associate editor of Columns magazine.

“Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes” will occupy the Stroum and East Galleries of the Henry Art Gallery from April 22 through Oct. 1. Lin will give an artist’s talk at 7 p.m. on April 20. Visit henryart.org for more information.