Join us at Asia Society’s New York headquarters for a special evening featuring renowned artist and architectural designer Maya Lin. As part of our 70th-anniversary milestone series, she will share her perspectives on how creative practice engages with memory, landscape, and the natural environment. The discussion will explore how art, architectural design, and environmental thinking foster reflection, responsibility, and a deeper sense of connection across cultures and generations.

Speaker:

Maya Lin is a visionary artist who has created a remarkable and complex body of work, encompassing sculpture, architecture, and memorials, that have explored our history and culture, our relationship with the natural environment, and the passage of time.

From her very first work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. – which she designed when she was a 21-year-old undergraduate student at Yale, she has forged a unique and highly acclaimed path practicing in both architecture and art, whilst still maintaining her memory works – five memorials that have focused on some of the critical issues of our time, that have been groundbreaking in their design.

Architectural works such as Novartis Cambridge Campus and the Nielsen Library for Smith College as well as a performing arts lab center for Bard College, are exemplary for their design, sustainability, sensitivity to the environment, and their deeply human spaces. Her artworks have created a unique voice in large scale environmental earthworks and her studio sculptures are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the National Gallery of Art amongst others. Most recently “Seeing Through the Universe”, two sculptural fountains were unveiled at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Seen as a whole, Lin’s body of work is a remarkable achievement. To have achieved consistent success and renown in three distinct disciplines – art, architecture, and the creation of memorials – is extremely rare; to have done so as a woman and as the child of immigrants, in fields still overwhelmingly dominated by male practitioners, is unparalleled.

Lin’s achievements have been widely recognized. She was one of the youngest women to be inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame, and she has been elected to membership in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been profiled in TIME, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, among many other outlets. Freida Lee Mock’s 1996 documentary about her, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2009, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising her for a celebrated career in both art and architecture, and for creating a sacred place of healing in our nation’s capital.

Tickets: $20 Members, $30 Nonmembers. Students and Seniors: Use coupon SENSTU at check out.