Expert: Terry Thatcher Waltz - 1/5/2008

Question
Hi,

Hope you are in good health and doing great. I was very interested in two art prints which I found under the category of wisdom on art.com. I wanted to know what all those writings meant in the first picture. And also the second picture had just one word, I think. Thank you so much in advance.

first picture:
http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--10063070/SP--A/IGID--680123/Wisdom.htm?sOrig...

second picture:
http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--12331292/SP--A/IGID--12331292/Wisdom_Calligr...

Answer
Not to be too curmudgeonly, but I would never buy these as "art" prints. The Chinese characters are clunky, obviously copied by someone who does not write Chinese and has never learned calligraphy. I peg this guy as someone who studied Chinese for a year or two, or maybe taught English in China, picked up a little and now believes he knows about it.

The characters on the upper right of the first one are supposed to be "zhihui" for "wisdom" (but as noted, they look awful). I can't figure out what is meant by the larger character at the upper left. The line going down the left side says (in a very literal way) "Your speech full of wisdom".

The single-character print is of the character "zhi" which CAN mean "wisdom" but is never used alone in Modern Chinese. (Everyone seems to think that one character = one word, especially in tattoos -- it's not the case.)

Personally, I'd save my money. Kitschy stuff at best.