William Blake, regarded as one of the great Romantic poets, was a prolific painter, printer, and engraver as well. Yet, he did not receive due credit for his work during his time. For a long time, his graphic art and literature were treated in isolation from each other; literary critics focused only on his poems and art historians on his engravings or paintings. Recently, attempts to see his work, particularly his illuminated books, as a “composite art” or as a synthesis of word and image have increased. I will also consider his work as a kind of open text in a poststructuralists’ notion, which blurs the boundaries between them and encourages readings as textual performance. In this paper, I will first show how Blake differentiated himself from other painters, engravers, and publishers by devising his own way of creating and printing illuminated books. Next, focusing on his earlier work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I will briefly discuss the characteristics of his illustration and the content of his poems. Finally, I demonstrate how Songs makes for unique reading in which the reader is an ongoing participant in its textuality, crossing between words and words, and words and images. The advent of the Industrial Revolution brought with it an increase in mass publication, and the distinction between fine art and designs or craftsmanship was yet to be clarified. Against such distinction, Blake created a unique method of "relief-etching", through which he combined text and engraved illustration on a single copper plate and hand-colored the prints. Each copy thus remains a unique work of art. His illuminated books envision interdisciplinary and multimedia text and question the modern system of classification and hierarchies between poem and painting, painting and engraving, art and literature. In the images of Songs, we see Blake’s profound interest in Gothic art as “divine” work. For example, he persisted in using firm outlines that were characteristic of Gothic art. Like other Romantic poets, Blake believed the imagination and God’s spirit to be manifest in outline rather than color. The letter was regarded to be appealing to the sensuality of the eyes. On the other hand, the poems in Songs reflect the dialectical relationship and synthesis in which “innocence” might be wedded to “experience,” as its subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Souls implies. Songs is, however, not to be read by isolating the poems from the illustrations. In the introduction of Songs of Innocence, Blake proposed the intricate and conflicting relationship between speech, writing, and painting. The title page also suggests that children are not merely passive learners imitating the nurse’s reading but active readers-seers who may better understand Blake’s illuminated books. Further, this paper, after the examination of a few poems, attempts to show that the images do not necessarily illustrate the poems and can rather create a link between different parts of the text. This rejects the traditional critical hierarchy of word over image. Blake’s work indeed opens up an infinite vortex, that is, the textuality, as Roland Barthes or other post-structuralists might call it, and invites us to participate as active readers.

In the history of visual art the images were often combined with linguistic text, as it is exemplified by the early egyptian mural, medieval religious painting with biblical quotation and the cubist paintings in 20st century. In those works the image and text cooperated complementarily with each other, pursuing the representation of the real. But in the second half of 20st century the poststructuralists proclaimed that the real doesn't exist at all and it is no more than the construction pursued by the signs such as language and image. Facing the crisis of representation the role of image and text in the visual art should have been changed. One of the leading video artist Gary Hill explored in his single channel video works in 1980's the working mechanism of image and text and their interaction, treating them as open signifier, which can be related numerous changeable new meanings. He also concentrates his inquiries on the role and meaning of language within our culture and other human context and destructed the existing mechanism of representation, which based on the solid relationship between signifier and signified. So, in <Why Do Things Get in a Muddle> he questions paradox of the logic, which served to produce the meaning of the world. In <Incidence of Catastrophe> he showed that all the metaphysical basement of our experience are not in itself real but they are just constructed through the semiotic process of image and words. These aspects of his arts are in some degree influenced by intellectual disposition of conceptual art in 1970's years, which revolved around the language instead of images. But his works explored not only the language but also the images as sign. Therefore his approach differ from the conceptual art, which eliminated the retinal aspects from their work. His works also set themselves apart from the ideology critical provocative work in 1980's, which targeted specific political and social issues. As he himself reaffirmed, his work focused on semiotic process and revealed unreliability of the working mechanism of logic, on which all the value system in our world based. In this sense his work in 1980's could be called meta-semiotic work.

Not only in the text, but also with the text, linguistic image comes into being. This means that it cannot only be interpreted, but it can also be presented physically. Here begins the issue of ‘presence culture’ as a relative concept of ‘meaning culture’. The so-called ‘pictorial/iconic turn’ sheds light on this material character of text. The text as a type of image presents itself sensately and enters spatially into relations with us. This iconization of text reminds us of the long history regarding the connection between image and text. In artistic tradition, such as text-labyrinth, micrography and concrete poem, the iconic text produces the meaning not only with the aid of grammatical structure, but also with visual sequence. The characters as abstract elements produce a visual form, and they create sensation and life in its visual sequence. The text constitutes a meta-code of image, in that it makes a visual form as such, and the image also becomes a meta-code of text because it restructures the text visually. In this way, image and text coalesce in a type of circular and dialectic relationship. This conglomerate finds a possibility in the artificial life art and bio art. In the artistic practice of computer algorithm and DNA scripts, it has an opportunity to be changed not only into aesthetic life but also into real life. The combination of characters does not make a sentence nor a visual form, but builds levels where real life can be emergent. Although we cannot explain why, there is a marvellous change, while the characters are combined, arranged, and changed chemically, physiologically, and electrically. Indeed, this kind of emergence of life completes the idea of presence. The image. or the text. does not only represent the reality, it also constitutes levels of life, presents itself, and becomes a life.

Courbet’s landscape was mostly created from 1855 to the four-year period of his exile in Switzerland and occupied the two third of his entire oeuvre. Landscape is important for shaping the artist’s subjectivity, aesthetic, and commercial strategy, but its rich significance has received insufficient attention in scholarship. Many critics and scholars consider Courbet’s turn from rural subjects to landscape as a betrayal of the Realist causes of social concerns and as tailoring to the market demand. This article discusses how Courbet’s landscape paintings achieve the dual goals of “truth to self” and “truth to nature” by departing from the depiction of rural labors and instilling emotional and aesthetic experience and environmental identity. There are three chief modes of representation at work: a positivist observation of material phenomenon and natural evolution; a visual recollection of body experience and local consciousness; an allegory of human condition derived from an understanding of nature as unbound desire and transient existence.

The technique of using the perspective of the "The Others" has been used continuously after modernity, in order to draw a more in depth image of one self. The other cannot be positioned without positioning the self and our own subjectivity because the self is more well defined through the other. Like the unquestionable 'Cogito' of Decartes, without a foundation of the self, 'other' cannot be established. The unquestionable 'Cogito' of Decartes, and problems of the subjectivity or problems of 'other' in East Asian society have close relations westernization and sharing western ideas of modernity. Image of ourselves after modernity cannot escape from 'orientalism' which divide the world into the occident and the orient. Modernity of the west was a process of developing a paradigm of life different from the medieval period, and also discovering properties of themselves through "otherising" the East. Therefore for the West, modernity becomes a continuous arena for overcoming paradoxes of their own. However for many North East Asian countries, modernity is a rupture. The text examines how different methods of two different backgrounds tackle the issues regarding "The Others"- works of Eastern and Western contemporary artists, Yang Fudong and Isaac Julien.

Images have invaded nearly every section of our daily lives, from newspapers and magazines to advertisements we see all around. The form that these images take usually is the photograph, accompanied by written (or spoken) words of some sort – and thus actually forming an interaction of text and images. The culmination of this interaction is the so-called “photographic essay”, a series of photographs depicting a specified topic accompanied by text, usually published in a magazine, in a book or on the internet. To understand the potential of both image and word, a close reading of the seminal photo-essay Let Us Pray Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee shows that words can be devoid of the logos, the “logic”, argumentative potential of language, whereas images on the other hand can be arranged to make sense in a logical way. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is read as criticism of the photographic essay as it is used in magazines, a criticism that nonetheless shows why and how the interaction of images with the written word transforms real experiences into experiences of reality, how it makes information happen.