A little while ago, Travis from All Things Go did a podcast interview with me about the game of go, my art, and my involvement in the go community.

It’s available in 2 parts on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.
Part 1 on Spotify: click here.
Part 2 on Spotify: click here.

​It was fun to talk about my life as a go player and all the different projects I've worked on over the years. We talk about my go studies in Wuhan in 2010, my inspiration for go drawings, the BadukMovies video platform, my book series Weird and Wonderful, and much more. Thanks for having me, Travis! I look forward to listening to more podcasts about our beautiful game.

My eighth consecutive cover design for the Nederlandse Go Bond (Dutch Go Association), featuring animals and paper marbling. The 2023 yearbook shows a swordfish jumping out of the sea and a 9x9 go board in the sky. The game of go that it depicts is nearing completion: we are looking at an endgame problem with a surprising twist. Komi is half a point; it is black to play and win by the smallest of margins. Can you find the tesuji?

In 2015 I created a series of 10 animal illustrations in black and white for BadukTV, a Korean television channel that broadcasts the game of go 24/7. The go boards depicted in the drawings were to have specific dimensions: 9x6, 13x13, 9x13, 9x9, 5x5, 13x13, 13x9 and 9x5. The plan for these drawings was to use them on promotional material for kids in Korea. BadukTV requested empty go boards, as they planned on adding go shapes themselves. 

I drew a turtle, a swordfish, a ring-tailed lemur, emperor penguins, a panda, an owl, a giraffe, an elephant, a butterfly and a raccoon-dog. Three of those were alterations of artworks I had already made in the past: the turtle, the swordfish and the raccoon-dog. The other seven drawings I made specifically for this project. See all 10 of them below.

Sadly, for reasons still unclear to me, BadukTV shelved the project and my drawings were never used in Korea. The good thing about the situation was that the rights for the drawings came back to me and I was free to use them any way I wanted. In the years that followed, I created many colour versions of the artworks, incorporating puns for names of go shapes, historic go matches and swirly backgrounds made with marbled paper: click here to see the results. Some of these colour versions made it to the covers of the Dutch Go Yearbook (see here) and over the years I sold many of them in the form of art prints, postcards and mugs in my Etsy shop.

A few of the black and white animals never made a reappearance: the owl, the giraffe and the panda were left and forgotten. Recently I rediscovered the panda and re-designed it (first picture of this post) when I was working on a 2024 go calendar (now 20 for sale: click here). 

The panda drawing incorporates a 5 by 5 go board that is filled with a go position I thought up: a double ko that can never be resolved by either player sets up a seki on the entire board. Seki (セキ) is the Japanese term for a local stalemate position of 'shared life': neither black nor white can take away liberties of the other's group(s), resulting in a truce.

The panda artwork is now for sale as cards and posters.
Click here for the postcard.
​Click here for the poster.

Martien van Agtmaal, one of the editors of digital cultural magazine De Optimist, asked me around the beginning of October if I'd like to make an illustration for the poem 'so this is my wilderness' by Lilian van Ooijen. The poem evokes several surreal images, among which are the union of a passion fruit and a dripping quince, a licorice key and sedimentary rock formations. It can now be read (in Dutch) on the website of De Optimist, by clicking here. 

The cover of the 2021-2023 Dutch Go Yearbook is the seventh consecutive one in a series I have made for the Nederlandse Go Bond (the Dutch Association for the game of Go, also known as baduk (바둑) in Korea, weiqi (围棋) in China and igo (囲碁) in Japan). It features my artwork "Two Little Birds Play Go on the Feathers of a Peacock", which was originally made as a private commission between 2020 and 2022, You can read more background information and view some detailed pictures of the peacock artwork by clicking here.

I recently created a logo for the Ambassadors Group of NBD Biblion.
NBD Biblion is a foundation that supports libraries throughout the Netherlands and parts of Flanders and provides them with a wide array of services. The foundation stimulates the sharing of information through books and other media. Among other things, NBD Biblion prepares all the books for Dutch libraries so that they have the right coding, are durable and ready for long-term use, offers logistic services to libraries and schools for the management of collections, collects metadata and writes summaries on new publications in the Dutch language, creates specialist machinery for the sorting, printing and plastification of books, stimulates reading through educational programs and provides book recommendation software for librarians and individual readers.

The Ambassadors Group of NBD Biblion was created for the employees. It gives them a place to feel proud of what they do, voice their opinions within the company and share their expertise with the rest of the world. 

The design I made is largely based on NBD Biblion's colourful logo and its corporate identity, inspired by innovation, paper and traditional printing techniques. The crowns represent the value of the employees: they are essential to the organisation and should be celebrated. An ambassador is a true representative of a company, someone that can convey what they stand for.

Dear go players,

I have heard your cries and I have listened!
A while ago I did an online poll to ask what kind of products you would like to see for my go-related designs, and the majority of you mentioned clothing and stickers. 

I've had a shop on Spreadshirt for a while, but throughout the years it turned into a bit of a mess due to all the changes in Spreadshirt's user interface and policies. I recently decided that I would clean it up and update the shop, so I've been working on it religiously.  

Now all my go-related art is purchasable in the form of apparel and other merchandise! It is accessible by clicking here. The shop features worldwide shipping and a wide variety of products, from T-shirts, hoodies, jackets, caps and all sorts of other clothes for both men and women (adults & children!), to stickers, fridge magnets, mousepads, buttons, bags, pillow cases, phone cases and much more.

By clicking on one of the products in the shop, you are able to access all products available in that specific design. You are also able to search by category/type of product by using the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

If you like any of the products in the shop, but would like the design to your own taste - bigger, smaller, in a different spot on the product, combined with others designs: anything is possible. Send me a message, and I'm sure I can arrange it for you.

Spread the word and happy shopping!

I used my latest marbled papers to create a new go-related artwork. It features the go board from my poster design for the Dutch Open: depicting a match that was played between top Chinese professionals Mi Yuting 9-dan (芈昱廷) and Ke Jie 9-dan (柯洁) on the 15th of February 2023.

This artwork comes in a variety of four different background colors of yellow, green, purple and blue. All versions are available as posters and as postcards in my Etsy shop. You can reach the products by clicking the images below.

This design is also available on T-shirts and other clothing and household items in my Spreadshirt shop: click here.

I finally had time to scan the papers of my marbling session in May (link to previous blogpost here). Some of these are lighter than most of my previous marbles, particularly the yellow ones, which I'm really happy about: light marbled papers are better as backgrounds. I'm looking forward to using these for cover designs and as backdrops to my illustrations. 

During the scanning process I rediscovered old marblings in an art folder, made back in 2016-2018. I've scanned those as well, which can be viewed below. Several of these would make great bookmarks.