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Subject:前程萬里
Posted By: Super Fri, Mar 28, 2014
Thanks to Mikeoz for posting the painting and translating the seal. The original poster posted two seals but I only saw one seal on the painting. Where is the other one?
The title of the picture is a four-character Chinese cheng yu (idiom)
前程萬里 Qiang Cheng Wan Li
first two characters 前程 means future and
last two characters 萬里 means ten thousand miles;
Using together, it is used to congratulate a person to have a very brilliant future. Usually, you will use this when a young person who will enter college or start a new career.
The seal shown on the second picture (where is it on the painting?) is:
觀萬物有生意
觀 - guan, using as a verb, means to watch or watching;
萬物 - wan wu, using as a compound noun, means all things on earth (ten thousand objects);
有 you - full of, exists.
生意 - using as a 2-character compound noun again, means life and vitality (interestingly it can also mean business (trades) depending how you use it in a sentence. That shows you the difficulty in translating some of these Chinese 2-character compound nouns)
Together, the seven-character sentence means:
From watching (and observing) everything on earth we can feel the existence of life and vitality.
Cannot really read the signature of artist (enlarged and clear picture needed), the first character indeed looks like 小 xiao (small) which was commonly used by some Chinese as part of their nick names. For example, if your family name is Lai, others (close friends or families) or yourself can call you Xiao Lai.
Hope this helps.
Super
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