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The exhibition, Lingo, explored various aspects of language. Its curator, Lucienne Fontannaz, chose both writers and visual artists, an indication that here verbal and visual languages were to be compared. The subtitle of this exhibition was getting the picture which means both seeing, and reaching an understanding. These need not be two distinct propositions but can be one and the same. There is a Western philosophical tradition which links thought not to that which we speak or write but to that which we see—our word 'idea' comes from the Greek £t8w which means 'to see' or 'to be face to face.1
A fundamental way in which the image differs from the text is that written and spoken texts are decidedly less encoded by their own materiality than are visual images.2 However, the relationship between word and image becomes complex when we consider those instances in which the word operates as image—as in the cases of calligraphy, written languages consisting of pictograms, and the colophon or textual inscription which is traditionally incorporated into Chinese paintings. In one of three large ink drawings by Irene Chou which were included in Lingo, a symbol which appeared to be a written character or alphabet letter dominated the image and took on ambiguous three-dimensional spatial characteristics which we associate more often with an image than with a text. It served to problematise the relationship between the two. The governing concern of the artists and writers in this exhibition was linguistic relativity, the notion that language both conveys and contains one's world view. The majority of the participants in Lingo engaged with the idea that we see, experience, and understand things differently within different