Maya Lin at Pace Hong Kong

Acclaimed American artist and architect Maya Lin holds her first Hong Kong solo exhibition at Pace Hong Kong. The exhibition presents selections from her “Disappearing Bodies of Water and Fractured Landscape” series, and two new wall pieces made using steel pins or recycled silver.

The exhibition features works that reveal Lin’s interdisciplinary artistic practice and commitment to the natural environment, the central concern throughout her entire body of work. Developed from methods of rendering nature such as cartography, Lin’s sculptures integrate the rational with the beautiful, transforming the visible natural world and “invisible” environmental forces into tangible works of art using materials such as marble, wood, silver and iron. The works on view engage thematically with history, technology, memory and time.

“The Disappearing Bodies of Water” series uses layers of Vermont Danby marble to chart the changes of sites including Lake Chad in Africa and the Aral Sea in the Middle Asia. The shape of each layer, derived using data from satellite imagery, maps the diminishment of these bodies of water from overuse as well as climate change. The sculptures can be seen as records of environmental change and tributes to the bodies of water as they existed in recent memory.

Suggesting bodies of water, the works that make up the Fractured Landscape series are the result of the artist pressing sheets of paper against shards of glass covered in pastel. Though abstract, they evoke images of deltas, marshes, islands and river systems.

Continuing Lin’s cartographic imagery and methodology are two wall-mounted works, “Pin River–Yangtze” (2015) and “Silver Pearl” (2015), which use pins and recycled silver, respectively, to form aerial views of water systems and flood plains. The works in the exhibition depict the water patterns of Asia’s longest river and tributary system using steel pins, and those of Southern China’s Pearl River in silver.