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Was wondering whether this was Chinese or Japanese? Possible age and translation of text? And whether the artist was anyone special. Thanks for the help as always.

The year - GengXu 庚戌 - 1970

The artist - Yang Ming 陽明。

The seal is of relatively low quality, not only reading from left to right (which is incorrect) but the radical of the Ming character is incorrect also.

The artist is

陽明山人

陽明 Yang Ming, probably the Yang Ming Mountain in Taiwan.

山人 - Shan Ren, a compound word, literally means a person who lives in the mountain; in this case, a hermit who would rather lives in the mountain and far away from others.

Many Chinese artists or scholars like to call themselves 山人, like the famous 八大山人.

The last character is 寫
means written by or drawn by.

The seal is a modern rendition of 陽明, not much a seal.

The two sentences are:

送君尚有紅葉在
且放征懷萬里心

The last two lines at the left of the inscription indicate that your picture of children flying a bird-shaped kite was done at Yangming Mountain (Yangming shan - 陽明山) during the summer of the gengxu year (gengxu xia - 庚戌夏). The red seal also reads "Yang Ming Shan", with the miniature "Shan" character tucked between the others at the top.

This most likely would be the Yangming Mountain in the suburbs of Taipei, Taiwan, while the cyclical year of gengxu probably is the one that came around most recently in 1970. I believe the picture on cloth with tie-dyed appearance may be a silk-screened print as opposed to hand-painted. Such art was quite popular when I was in Taiwan in the 1970's and 80's.

Best regards,

Bill H.

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