VOA慢速英语 Maya Lin's Works Are Her Answer to the Beauty of the Natural World

　　Her series called "Bodies of Water" is like an artistic geography lesson. These works are also about unseen underwater landscapes. Maya Lin cut out the shapes of three bodies of water using thin layers of wood.

　　One work is done in the shape of the Caspian Sea, another in the shape of the Black Sea, and the third takes the form of the Red Sea. The many layers of wood in each sculpture become thinner towards its base, or the area that relates to the deepest part of the sea.

　　Another series called "Fractured Landscapes" looks like drawings of rivers and streams. But these drawings were made by pressing paper against broken sheets of glass covered in ink.

　　Maya Lin has also made a sculpture for the United States Embassy in Beijing, China. Her "Pin River-Yangtze" is made of about thirty thousand small metal pins stuck into the wall. The many pins take the shape of one of the longest rivers in the world.

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　　VOICE ONE:

　　Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio in nineteen fifty-nine. Her parents had each fled China in the late nineteen forties. They met and married while living in the United States. Later, both parents taught at Ohio University. Her mother, Julia, was a literature professor. Her father, Henry, was a ceramist, an artist who makes objects out of clay. As a child, Maya would play with clay in her father's studio. She was also influenced by the wooded hills near her home as well as by local Native American burial hills.

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