What is Missing? Reflections on the Human-nature Relationship in Maya Lin's Final Memorial

摘要

This article provides an analysis of Maya Lin's final memorial, What is Missing? (WIM), to understand how it rhetorically draws awareness to the material impacts of the nature-culture divide. Lin's memorial argues for preserving the natural world through combining visual, aural, and textual elements and employing locus of the irreparable within an online interface. The combination of these rhetorical strategies, as well as the interaction between form and content, disrupts the human gaze, which frames nature as an object for consumption. WIM also activates mastery-harmony, othering-connection, and exploitation-idealism dialectics to highlight the tension between these opposing perspectives and to create discursive openings for new understandings of the human-nature relationship.