Kiseido Publishing Company is privileged, proud, and pleased to be able to offer visitors to this site a unique catalogue introducing a genre of Far Eastern art, little known and heralded less. Toward remedying this notable omission we present a sampler of ten selections from the newly published CD ROM Japanese Prints and the World of Go -- nowhere available in the world but here -- of more than 100 works of art that feature, at 3,000 years, the world's oldest continuously played intellectual board game. This catalogue of radiant prints and beguiling commentary is without precedent, and a rare occasion when the word unique rightly means there is no other.

In eleven chapters demonstrating go's prominence throughout East Asia's recorded history, Japanese Prints and the World of Go illustrates the game's long migration through time, beginning with its status in antiquity as a contemplative pastime worthy of divine Immortals and Sages great in years and learning. Conforming to traditional tales and legends, artists situated go players at the farthest reaches of remoteness, on the pinnacles of mountains, rendering the go board as inextricable from nature itself -- incised in the rock's surface -- the course of play possessing the power to dissolve all ordinary boundaries of time and space. With these early images of time transfigured we see go portrayed as a means of transcending life's everyday concerns. Visually described is a way of being lost in thought, transported "out of this world," and a means by which religious adepts could contemplate the infinite.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, artists of the Edo period (1615-1868) displayed go in its role as activity and participant -- in a literal sense, often occupying center stage -- in the too swiftly passing pleasures of life, among those diversions emblematic of the transience of la dolce vita:

Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating, caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current; this is what we call the floating world.

From the novel Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo Monogatari) by Asai Ryoi (1612?-91) (1)

It is this hedonistic floating world of celebrated pleasures seized from fleet and flowing time that the greater number of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) in the catalogue reveal. In ways anticipating the French Impressionists and their depictions of scenes of everyday life -- spectacularly, the life of the stage and backstage, of cafes and brothels -- the ukiyo-e artists frequented the pleasure districts doubtless for the fun of it but also to provide themselves with numerous examples for their prints of a compelling combination of spontaneity and highly-stylized theatricality. Sharing in common techniques of a similar order of self-presentation, actors and courtesans of high rank (for whom the art of playing go was a social requirement) were the most commonly rendered subjects.

Added to this, the fact of go's multiple roles (as the subject of a play in its own right; as, often, the staging area and focus for dramatic activity; or as the arena itself -- a play within a play -- and prop, weapon, or poetic metaphor for a fund of associations echoing in the public mind) contributed to the frequency of its appearance in the pictures. Prints of these kinds gratified a multitude of cravings for collectors' items and mementos of favorite `stars' (whether actors in their on-stage roles or high-ranking courtesans who passed before their admiring fans in processions through the streets), and served as advertising posters.

For those unfamiliar with the game these prints depict it should be noted that go's strong presence in the cultures of the Far East it held, and holds, in thrall -- most consistently and dynamically, Japan -- is reason enough for its recurrence as a pervasive motif in the several realms portrayed by artists: those of legend, literature and history, of the military, religion, and theatre. But it is also the appearance of the game's playing equipment, and the continuously subtle shape-shifting configurations of design and pattern, woven and unwoven across the board from first transfixing move to last in the evolution of a long game, that are more than sufficient to explain the bewitching of artists' eyes.