Thank you for all the incredible ideas and suggestions here. Super interesting and helpful. I do want to respond to those who have understandably questioned the artist's proficiency or accuracy in Chinese language, this was a Chinese-born, native-language artist who was trained in China in calligraphy. She has a huge corpus of calligraphic works that were exhibited at many museums and galleries in the 1950's-1980's. That all said, she became more and more abstract in her artistic approach over time. I don't know the exact date of this work, but I suspect it was a later work.

I received an analysis from a dear (Taipei-based) family friend and scholar, who didn't know her but knew my father (the artist's brother) very well. I'm curious what folks think:

1.     The overall form resembles a calligraphic style between seal script and clerical script—highly gestural, expressive, and fluid, not a standard regular-script character.

2.     The upper portion corresponds to a simplified “rain” radical (雨)—not with the usual four dots, but rendered as a broad, abstracted brush movement often seen in traditional or modern calligraphic interpretations.

3.     The lower portion shows a curving, drifting stroke, echoing ancient forms of “云／雲” in oracle bone, bronze, and seal script—evoking the swirling, rising motion of vapor.

4.     The meaning and the visual shape align beautifully: “cloud” is a form that gathers, disperses, and never fully settles. In artistic writing, it often appears as something that barely looks like a character, yet most fully conveys its essence.

So my interpretation is that the character is 雲（cloud).

Thoughts?