Yen-Chao Lin Summoning
© Yen-Chao Lin, As Above So Below (detail), 2024
Summoning offers a cumulative showcase of Yen-Chao Lin’s work over the past five years, a glimpse of her investigation into the human connection to the unseen and the unknown; the invisible moving forces that influence the physical world. The exhibited works include the handmade paper A Tender Act series (2018), the 8mm short film The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay (2019), and the new large-scale installation As Above So Below (2024).
A Tender Act is inspired by tasseomancy, the practice of interpreting messages found in the configurations of tea leaves. Following a disciplined two-year daily ritual of hair collecting, the artist has been developing a form of divination by reading naturally fallen hair.
The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay is an experimental documentary shot in the Amis tribal village of Hualian. Shot in 8mm, the film travels through the east coast of Taiwan, where nature, landscape, and different layers of colonization portray a unique kind of religious worshiping, unraveling mixed faith expressions from Daoist ritual possession to personal prayers, all the while attempting to trace the memories of past Amis sorcerers.
Finally, As Above So Below is an in-situ custom sculptural installation of thousands of Canadian pennies flattened by trains, floating in mid-air like a snake in the gallery. A black & white enamelled steel plate installed under mimicks the shadow of the penny sculpture. As Above So Below is born out of the artist’s research on dowsing (water witching), referring to the practice of using a forked stick, metal rods, or pendulum to locate underground water, minerals, or other hidden substances.
The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, Atelier La Coulée, The Long Haul Art Studios, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Aurélie Guillaume, Rachelle Marcoux, all penny donors & Oliver Lewis.
© Yen-Chao Lin, As Above So Below (detail), 2024
Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a Taipei-born Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Through means of intuitive play, collaboration, scavenging and collecting, her tactile practice often incorporates various craft techniques, such as copper enamelling, metal smithing, glass, and ceramics; creating installations, sculptures, and experimental films. Yen-Chao is also a natural history enthusiast and an avid collector, gathering specimens of mineral, botanical, animal and industrial origins, working with all kinds of objects that stare at the vestiges of a recent or distant past, with a story to tell. Yen-Chao has been invited to give public presentations at Artexte (Montreal), GAX Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art (Montreal), PHI Foundation (Montreal), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Her works have been shown at Art Metropole (Toronto), Berlinale, Centre A (Vancouver), Hong-gah Museum (Taipei), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Montreal), among others.