Wisdom Listens to Snow
This is the roughly translated title of this piece.
Title Information | | Character | Pinyin | Meaning |
 | gāo | Superior |
 | shì | People |
 | tīng | Listens (to) |
 | xuē | Snow |
Note that "superior" and "people" together
means "wise people" or simply "wisdom". |
This one is a little hard to explain. The cranes represent "superior wisdom" and are listening to the snow.
The meaning is two-fold:
First, to gain wisdom, one must listen carefully to all of the knowledge given to them.
Second, sometimes knowledge is as quiet as snow, and you must be silent (not talking) if you want to hear the important things that a wise person should know.
This hand-painted artwork is from the
Xiao Meng Asian Art Collection
The artists of this collection are actually a married couple who travel around China together looking for subjects to paint. Their real names are Chen Yong Ping and Chen Wei Ling but they sign all of their work under the single pen name Xiao Meng.
They work as a team on most of these paintings. One of them does the background and the other will handle the detail work on each painting.
The artists take great pride in the fact that they have developed their own unique painting style which they call "hazy painting" (this is roughly translated - it sounds better in Chinese).
They use a combination of "freehand style" and "elaborate style" in their paintings. The background is done using broad fast strokes and spray with very thin paint. The foreground (cranes) are done with a lot of detail using a delicate technique with a very fine brush.
