In everyday life, we often mishear, misread, or misconstrue words in conversation and reading — yet such moments frequently give rise to unexpected humour and resonance. This phenomenon is particularly vibrant in Taiwanese pun culture: what may appear as nonsensical linguistic play is, in fact, rich with texture, context, and creativity. These ubiquitous wordplays serve as quiet reminders that language is not a sealed conduit for communication, but rather a generative site of fissures, shifts, and transformation.

The exhibition 'In a Nutshell In a Nut Shell I'm Not Sure' draws its title from a playful misreading and semantic shift of the English idiom ‘in a nutshell’. While the phrase typically signifies ‘to put it simply’, it is often miswritten as ‘in a nut shell’, a more literal and image-driven rendering that evokes the concrete imagery of nuts and shells. This interpretive detour opens a path for associative thinking. The addition of ‘I'm not sure’ arises from a phonetic slippage that extends the pun — juxtaposing idiomatic meaning with its misreading, the title sets the tone for a linguistic game of dislocation and multiplicity, echoing the exhibition’s exploration of how meaning is generated and transformed.

Framed by the notions of ‘misplacement’ and ‘transformation’, the exhibition invites five artists to approach language, the body, everyday experience, and symbols through various mediums — including painting, sculpture, ceramics, and moving image — to explore how meaning emerges through reinterpretation and playful divergence. Each artwork is positioned as an open-ended utterance: not in pursuit of a definitive statement, nor presupposing a single reading, but inviting viewers to drift, encounter, and generate their own pathways of understanding.

In this exhibition, Chang Wenwoan engages in witty and agile negotiation between thinking and making, exploring the edges of inspiration and authorship; Lee Kit explores the shifting dynamics between visual and power through an intricate interplay of image, body, and language; Yen Yuting employs ink to render traces and glitches of the digital environment, evoking a psychological landscape of absurdity and isolation amidst information overload. In a gesture of material translation, Jung Seungwon weaves digital language into traditional textile practices, extending the layers of time and perception; while Liao Chinhsiang interlaces brushwork and colour to summon the gaps of memory and a poetic visual flow.

Together, the five artists construct a constellation of interpretations and inquiries around memory, time, and perception — pointing towards a shared proposition: that meaning does not solely reside in the original form of language or image, but arises through processes of translation, reassembly, and transformation. The exhibition, through artistic practice, seeks to expand the dimensions of perception and meaning-making. Each work, like an open sentence, gestures toward a semantic shift — where even a minor turn can lead to new ways of seeing and understanding, prompting a reconfiguration of how we read, sense, and relate to the world.

Curatorial Team: Sara Wu, Sean Tseng