Venerating vanishing flash of memory

• Source: Global Times
• [22:08 October 18 2009]
• Comments

By Peng Yining

After 30 years' working with memories and the past, Maya Lin said she wanted to "pull back" something from vanishing through her new memorial What is Missing.

"Memorial is inherently about memory. A few of my works, Vietnam Veterans or Civil Rights, were about what we want to remember," said the 50-year old architect.

"I don't think any of my history works have been all about the past. They are always about encouraging us to use the past to form a different future."

What is Missing, a multi-site video project, focused attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime.

"If we don't realize we are losing it, we are never going to warn and we are never going to do something about it," Lin said at its international debut at the Beijing Center for the Arts on September 19.

"The work is not about something that is dead and gone. We focus on the species and places that can be pulled back, and there will be recovery stories."

Fragile life

A long stairway to the center's basement leads the audience to What is Missing. The empty room is dark, resounding with animal sounds like whale song and bird chirping.

Projectors on the ground project videos of endangered species onto A4 pieces of organic glass held in the hand of the visitor. Holding their glass with clean white gloves, visitors stand in the dark and watch as introductions to species beam onto the glass, fading in and out.

The sound of the animals is a critical element of What is Missing, Lin said.

"People don't see the animal before you hear or read about it," she said. "And we are very visual. If I can stop what you have been seeing, you will pay attention to it.

"That's why I need a black room."

On the glass in their hands, visitors see pictures of apes, dolphins, polar bears as well as other species of animals. Dolphins were shown as playing around, and polar bears wandering in a white world.

College student Liu Xi said he held the glass carefully. "I held this piece of glass with animal images like I was holding the endangered animal itself in my own hand," he said. "I was afraid I'd drop and break it."

Memorials have always been educational, according to Lin. She said she hoped this monument would make people realize something is dying and can be saved by a change in people's behavior.

"Pollution from over-consumption is spreading across the world, and it is not going to change unless people change the daily habit of what we eat, what we buy, what we don't buy."

Lin herself quit plastic bags three years ago. It was a hard thing to do at first in New York City, she said, because when you showed up with a knitting bag people acted like they thought you were crazy.

"But now everyone gets it," she laughs. "I mean if you make up you mind to do that, it's not that hard."

Lin has two children: 10 and 11. She said they have way too much stuff and it means nothing to them. "I grew up as kid with much less stuff and each toy meant a lot more," she said.

"We have been sold by the market. That doesn't make us any happier. If I can do anything to shift their behavior, I try. All people are related to nature I don't want it that my kids can't hear the singing you hear in the video."

Lin engulfed herself in a sofa and smiled. She wore no makeup and kept her hair neat and short, the same as she had in the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision that won an Academy Award 15 years ago.

Lin said as an architect she chose to put her work on stage without showing off herself. After she finished her first work – the iconic Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the age of 22 – Lin went back to Yale University in Newhaven, Connecticut, and only accepted one interview before the monument was dedicated.

Privacy

After a three-hour speech and forum with Chinese conservation leaders at the opening ceremony for her work in Beijing, Lin found she had almost lost her voice.

Six reporters from four publications including the Global Times surrounded her throwing questions. Then a photographer turned his spotlight on her face.

"One picture, please," the photographer interrupted the chattering reporters.

"One, OK," she said.

"Probably more than one, sorry," he said.

Conservation is hard work that needs money, help and attention, Lin turned and told the reporters.

"I am pretty private," she told the Global Times. "But publicity is a part of the whole project. I can understand."

In Beijing for less than 48 hours, she would soon fly back to the United States for another press conference about her work.

"Missing scared me," she said. "I haven't worked with video or multimedia before. I am not a video artist and it really scared me."

Lin famously used to deal in granite, but she used What is Missing to rethink the idea of a memorial. This latest work of hers was created in several mediums, and its different parts were placed at several venues.

Lin's first attempt at this memorial was a rectangular table with a desktop as a screen to show the video.

"It turned out a disaster," she said. "One day I put a piece of plastic board on the table and … thought holding a piece of a picture in the hand must be a better idea."

"Missing was my first try with multimedia, and really exhausted me in the last two or three years," she said. "I really need to take a break."

What is Missing will be Lin's last memorial work, according to the press release.

"Who knows? Maybe 10 years later, I will have another try with a monument," she laughed. "But the theme of that memorial must be about the environment."