Panda 5x5 Seki - Looking Back #6

---

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). 

2024 Go Calendar, available in my Etsy store

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.