Hiroshi Soga: The Painting as a Game of Go
In one of Hiroshi Soga’s works exhibited in his studio, fragments of Go game records are discreetly embedded within the surface. This presence of Go, singular in his practice, illuminates the underlying logic of construction that runs through his entire artistic approach. It offers a metaphor through which to understand the artist’s technique, aesthetics, and vision at once.
As before the creation of the artwork, at the beginning of a game of Go there is nothing—except nineteen vertical and nineteen horizontal lines forming three hundred and sixty-one intersections. Upon these points each player, in turn, places a stone: black, then white, and so on. Territories emerge, boundaries are defined, structures take shape. Each stone placed is both a response and a question addressed to the other. Thus the game unfolds until it closes and comes to rest: Go is a conversation in stones, where coexistence is required, boundaries are acknowledged, and space is ultimately shared in balance.
In ancient China, the square board represented the stable Earth; the nineteen lines, the fabric of the world; the three hundred and sixty-one intersections, the days and nights; and the round stones, the moving Heaven. To play, one first needs a board. Does Hiroshi Soga not proceed in the same way? Must he not also begin by creating his own board?
He first attaches silk to a wooden panel. He then applies a ground color, whose nuances gradually emerge as moisture penetrates the fibers. Soga layers pigments and reinforces the surface with a network of fine, taut cords that structure the composition without interrupting its continuity. Finally, the surface is covered with Japanese washi paper coated with nōzu adhesive paste, allowing the underlying colors and forms to diffuse slowly and rise through the material.
From this stage, the pictorial field begins to take shape: a regulated expanse in which lines, tensions, and depth reveal themselves—much like the creation of a Go board, when the grid takes form on warm kaya wood. What was cosmology in China becomes, in Japan, a phenomenology of space. The board no longer represents heaven and earth; it becomes the living field of ma (間), the inhabited interval in which relationships unfold. Each intersection is no longer a fixed point but a breath—a moment where possibility arises.
Soga now has his “board”: a surface of calm where emptiness acts, where each collage and each brushstroke transforms silence into presence. He begins to affix old fabrics, fragments of printed matter, pieces of lived material. These restrained gestures recall the opening moves of a Go game, when one occupies the corners before venturing toward the center. Each addition shifts an equilibrium, defines a provisional territory, expands or contracts the void.
Then comes the pressure of the hand, fixing the surface. Like a player reinforcing stones, Soga stabilizes matter and anchors color. The fine cords he stretches again divide the field into multiple sub-areas. Yet these lines are not simple boundaries. As Soga notes: “They sometimes appear like antennae extending outward, or like vessels and nerves within the painting, circulating information and energy.”
The Go player thinks of the fragile line of stones linking a threatened territory to a viable one beyond the opponent’s reach. These lines of life give Go its aesthetic force: a breath, a calm tension in which each move becomes relation. Upon this grid, gestures respond to gestures; colors adjust. The painting unfolds like a mature game, where each move seeks not conquest but precision.
Soga describes this moment as the formation of pictorial units: “Within this structure, I define units, layer colors upon them, and glue fragments of torn or printed paper. Each unit becomes an act of searching and connection.” He adds: “The boundaries between these units resemble the borders between masculine and feminine, or the junction of heaven (ten, 天) and earth (chi, 地); energy circulates there.”
Zones touch and respond to one another; tensions find balance within an inhabited space composed of silent correspondences. This is ma, the living interval in which each element affects the other, where emptiness acts. Similarly, in Japanese Go, the player who understands ma does not seek to fill space but to bring it into being. Ma functions as a dynamic unit of the game: through it, stones communicate, ally, or oppose. A group lives not by density but by the quality of its intervals—by the precision of the void that traverses it. To master ma is to understand that strength depends as much on the space left between stones as on those that are placed; emptiness is not absence but active relation, continually readjusted to the rhythm of the game.
Finally, Soga suspends his work outdoors in his garden, leaving an empty space beneath it. “The final work is never complete.” This refusal of closure belongs to the very logic of his practice, just as in a game of Go it is rare to play all the final moves. Each player knows when the game has reached its end well before the last stone is placed. To continue would disrupt a harmony already achieved: a silent field remains in which everything continues to resonate.
As Soga writes: “If the wind (kaze, 風) or the rain (ame, 雨) alters its form, it is accepted.” Chance becomes a partner; nature (shizen, 自然) a co-player. And the painting concludes in this way: “To accept imperfection, to welcome change, to recognize the value of what remains unfinished.”
Painting thus finds its truth not in the victory of a gesture but in the equilibrium of a shared breath between hand, material, and world: a completed yet open game, played in the air, to the rhythm of kūki (空気)—the very atmosphere that sustains it.
It is within this suspended time that meaning emerges. As Soga states: “Although each unit is independent, they are never entirely separate. They touch, influence, and resonate with one another. Thus time, matter, life, human society, and the cosmos extend outward while existing as a whole, in mutual coexistence.”
In Soga’s work, large planes of blue, yellow, red, black, and white become a capture of the world. The artist himself evokes an approach inspired by Empedocles, in which fundamental elements constitute the structure of reality. In his painting, these elements are transposed into color. Phenomenology becomes cosmology once again. Aesthetics, technique, and vision converge. Everything is connected.
The painting appears as the result of a layered process in which each gesture retains the memory of those preceding it. Likewise, in Go, the decisive move arises from a logic of accumulation: the patient formation of territories, the progressive development of tensions. Art and Go share the same principle: tsumu (積む) — to pile up, superimpose, accumulate, build in strata. Nothing occurs all at once; everything is constructed step by step.
In Hiroshi Soga’s art, this logic is manifest. The moment the work settles into form is the culmination of successive, superimposed gestures: silk affixed to panel, cords stretched, washi applied, pigments deposited. Each stage transforms the previous one, prepares the next, redistributes balance. Nothing is frontal. Nothing is antagonistic.
Where the game of Go produces asymmetry—one wins, the other loses—painting creates neither victor nor vanquished. The artist does not impose; he constructs. He does not occupy territory; he brings space into being. His tsumu emerges as intensity without confrontation.
It is this that allows Hiroshi Soga finally to suspend the work in his garden, offering it to wind, rain, chance, and to the gaze of the viewer.
Arnaud Quentin
Gujo Hachiman, February 2026
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