CIRCA art actuel is pleased to announce that the 2026 Pauline-Desautels Award goes to Yen-Chao Lin for her project En haut comme en bas (As Above, So Below), a large-scale installation made of thousands of copper pennies and enamelled steel, presented at OBORO in 2025.
The Pauline-Desautels Award is presented annually to a committed woman artist whose work in sculpture or installation, in line with CIRCA’s mission, has stood out to the public and to the artistic community as a whole over the past three years. The award was made possible thanks to the generous contribution of Ms. Pauline Desautels.
Suspended in the air, the work is made of thousands of pennies flattened by trains and riveted by hand, forming an organic line that traces an invisible topography in space. Below, a dark counterpart in enamelled steel echoes this line while altering its shape. This duality, above and below, evokes the tensions between the precious allure of copper and the dark side of resource extraction, between product and labour, surface beauty and hidden cost.
About the artist
Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a multidisciplinary artist born in Taipei and based in Montréal. Having grown up in a multi-faith family, where she attended Sunday mass, Buddhist ceremonies, energy-healing sessions and New Age lectures alongside her mother, she is interested in spirituality, divination, dowsing, the occult sciences, alchemy and invisible forces – everything that can be perceived without necessarily being seen.
Passionate about natural history and an avid collector, she gathers specimens of mineral, botanical, animal and industrial origin, exploring how cultural heritage and personal hauntology intertwine through religious rituals, hermetic traditions and folklore. Through intuitive play, collaboration, salvage and collecting, her tactile practice often incorporates various craft techniques, such as enamelling on copper, metalwork and glasswork, to create installations, sculptures and experimental films.
