Maya Lin
Revealing the invisible
BY CELESTE NG
What I love about Maya Lin’s
work is that it layers what’s
right in front of us with
what might be forgotten or
overlooked. Think of how the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
superimposes the reflection
of your face with the names of
the fallen: a reminder that the
living and the dead, the past
and the present, can never
truly be disentangled.
Sometimes her work
reveals the literally hidden,
like underground rivers or
the dramatic contours of San
Francisco Bay. But it also
reveals inconvenient truths
long ignored: the costs of envi-
ronmental degradation, the
ravages of extinction, our long
national history of exclusion in
civil rights and gender equality.Ghost Forest (2021) did
both at once, puncturing
Madison Square Park with
an eerie glimpse into the
future: the slow decimation
of forests that’s already
occurring around the globe.
Lin has an uncanny power
to make the invisible visible,
shaking us out of compla-
cency into a new state of
awareness.Ng is a novelist, most recently
of Little Fires Everywhere