In this paper, we describe our studies of cross-language and cross-media image retrieval at the ImageCLEF 2005. This is the first participation of our CUHK (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) group at ImageCLEF. The task in which we participated is the “bilingual ad hoc retrieval” task. There are three major focuses and contributions in our participation. The first is the empirical evaluation of language models and smoothing strategies for cross-language image retrieval. The second is the evaluation of cross-media image retrieval, i.e., combining text and visual contents for image retrieval. The last is the evaluation of bilingual image retrieval between English and Chinese. We provide an empirical analysis of our experimental results, in which our approach achieves the best mean average precision result in the monolingual query task in the campaign. Finally we summarize our empirical experience and address the future improvement of our work.