Space oddity?

jeromie · Post by **jeromie** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:01 am

Nyanjilla wrote:The term "negative space" is often used in photography.

I think this comes the closest to approaching the oriental concept of empty space from a western perspective. The way the original post framed the question puts it in the realm of an aesthetic judgment rather than a purely rational analysis, though I don't think the two approaches need to be at odds. Just as in art, empty spaces can imply movement. In the case of go, it is this sense of space that contributes to the dynamism of a game that relies upon static stones.

Besides, if I knew all of the places NOT to put a stone, I could put it in the right place every time! (I wrote that glibly, but many tsumego rely upon knowing how not to kill your own eye space, so it's at least partially accurate.)

Nyanjilla · Post by **Nyanjilla** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:30 am

jeromie wrote:
Nyanjilla wrote:The term "negative space" is often used in photography.

I think this comes the closest to approaching the oriental concept of empty space from a western perspective. The way the original post framed the question puts it in the realm of an aesthetic judgment rather than a purely rational analysis, though I don't think the two approaches need to be at odds. Just as in art, empty spaces can imply movement. In the case of go, it is this sense of space that contributes to the dynamism of a game that relies upon static stones.

There is a certain amount of perceived wisdom in the choice of negative space, apart from "it just feels right". "Put some negative space in front of the subject to give it room to breathe" (the subject isn't necessarily a living creature, of course) or "Put some behind it to imply it is walking out of the frame" or "include lots of sky to show the immensity of the surroundings" or even just "put a large empty area next to the subject, for the advertising copy".

Can this thinking be applied to go, though?

jeromie wrote:
Besides, if I knew all of the places NOT to put a stone, I could put it in the right place every time! (I wrote that glibly, but many tsumego rely upon knowing how not to kill your own eye space, so it's at least partially accurate.)

That's one way of solving Sudoku puzzles, but then, there are fewer places to play there.

Polama · Post by **Polama** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:35 am

Emptiness and asymmetry are used in Western Art: in fact precise left-right symmetry is often criticized. Western games like basketball and the footballs are very much about the balance between players and empty space between them. I agree different cultures and different traditions will have their own preferences, ideas and emphasis on the concept, but the focus on empty space is far from uniquely Eastern.

From a go perspective, the interplay between stone and empty does seem to me to be the root of the game itself: All stones or no stones is not a game. We pass from an empty board of potential to a crowded yose with precise, discoverable correct moves. Different parts of the board pass at different rates, and you get interesting dynamic from this: Once an area solidifies it can "force" itself on the emptiness in the form of an escape towards life. Or it can preserve the emptiness, as in Go Seigen's "Chernobyl Areas". Certainly invasions, extensions, the potential of thickness are all functions of the surrounding emptiness. We focus on the stones to read the state of the board, and focus on the empty intersections to choose where to play. Or consider a thin black extension along the side, offering white the choice of transforming above or below into white stones, at the expense of preserving emptiness on the other side, now with a black wall separating it.

I don't think there's any magic to considering stone/empty intersection as some sort of yin/yang harmonious dichotomy that will transform your game, but I do think it makes for a relatively fertile space to plant analogies for organizing increasingly abstract and technical go thoughts.

emeraldemon · Post by **emeraldemon** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 9:30 am

John, I don't know if this is what you want, but you can click on "profile" under someone's post, and then click "add foe" and it will hide all of their posts by default, so you'll see e.g.

This post was made by RobertJasiek who is currently on your ignore list.

instead of the text of the post.

John Fairbairn · Post by **John Fairbairn** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:38 am

Here is a treat for Bill, mainly. I believe he is a great fan of the Great Senchi. It just so happens that this game can also be used to discuss the abstract concepts of solid and empty. Nb "solid" means "having substance" rather than just 'thick'.

White here was Suzuki Chisei, who was a much more than respectable player. He reached 6-dan, which today would mean 9-dan, and the only reason more is not heard of him is that he was the in-house go tutor for the Owari daimyo and so was not always in Edo. But quite a lot of his games remain, and his series of 100 games with Okunuki Chisaku is a famous jewel (Okunuki was a huge talent who gave Jowa a hard time, but he died young). Another distinction of Chisei is that his wife Yoshiko was an excellent player ranked as 1-dan and so they are counted as the first husband-and-wife professionals in history.

His opponent Ishihara Yasohachi was also a very decent player - a 4-dan in both go and shogi, but as he was a brewer by trade he counts as an amateur.

Now both these players were pupils of Senchi, hailed as the "Father of Modern Go" because he was perhaps the first properly to appreciate the centre of the board. What we see here is Chisei evidently trying to impress his teacher with his understanding of that style of play. And succeeding brilliantly in my opinion. First he creates a strong centre presence out of a couple of wispy groups: empty --> solid. He then converts the emptiness of the centre into substance of corner/side territory (but more than that forces his opponent to make him do it!). In this process, the "solid" move White 60 is noteworthy not just as a thick connection but as a way of suddenly transforming the empty centre into a place of substance.

But Black here is nobody's fool. He makes a very good fist of resisting White's intentions. The fatal flaw - pointed out by Shusai, not me - is Black 65. This was an "empty" (too open) move. It should have been a solid one, at 80. In other words, it was a strategic mistake through misjudging the interplay of solid and empty in the centre. It's a pity the game ended with a blunder by Black (181), but Shusai found not much else to criticise, and next to nothing by White.

Appreciating the game in these abstract terms may not give you any instant gratification in terms of go strength, but surely will enrich your feel for the depth of the game.

But even if you choose to view it in other terms, I think it is possible to feel the players striving not just to win but to impress the Great Senchi.

John, I don't know if this is what you want, but you can click on "profile" under someone's post, and then click "add foe" and it will hide all of their posts by default, so you'll see e.g.

Doesn't actually stop the hijacking and "foe" is way too strong. Incidentally, I never saw any lifting of his ban on making more than two posts in a thread. Did I miss something?

gowan · Post by **gowan** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:54 am

My first thought on reading the first post was that "empty" space referred to unoccupied pints that are still valuable. Space could also refer to space between stones, such as extensions. Then thin and overconcentration could be involved.

Have the art terms figure and ground been mentioned? It was difficult to read this thread so I might have missed them. In any case I wondered whether this dichotomy was relevant. It seemed it might be since the figure defines the ground and vice versa. I also wondered whether the Japanese use of "feeling" is relevant.

oca · Post by **oca** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:59 am

My first thought on reading the topic subject was... Major Tom...

rat4000 · Post by **rat4000** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 8:00 pm

I feel like posting a bunch of art. Maybe it will support Nyanjilla's point some more. I am not an art connoisseur or anything, I have slow nights at work and browse Wikipedia. These are mostly fairly famous people.

Anders Zorn: one, two. Maria Fortuny: one, two. Degas: one, two. Hunt. Caravaggio. Van Gogh.

These are all paintings, mostly oil paintings, so of course "empty space" is kind of relative; they are obviously less empty--louder--than something like this. (Van Gogh copied a Hiroshige print, for what it's worth; maybe a side-by-side comparison could be interesting for the purposes of the thread.) But some appreciation for emptiness definitely seems to be there. So I don't think that you can say that in general it is the appreciation (the presence or amount of appreciation) that Asians have for empty space that lets them play go better. Maybe it's the way they appreciate it?

In this vein, note also that all of the above paintings (particularly Fortuny's) make strong use of asymmetry. I do not know Japanese and am also unfamiliar with calligraphy (except for several old threads here), so I can't say how asymmetry is used in Japanese calligraphy specifically, but I would be really surprised if a Western artist's problem in writing characters was her inability to handle asymmetry. Is it possible that the people in the course you mentioned had some different problem? Perhaps a belief that writing was not art, and that a lack of symmetry was only welcome in art, or something similar. It is, after all, definitely welcome in art, and a necessary part of an artist's skillset--in fact, I can't recall a single Western work of art that I've seen that was really symmetrical; even in portraits the composition is usually broken up somehow. Probably the Chinese understanding of yin and yang is something different--I can't comment on it, knowing nothing at all of Chinese aesthetics, past or present--but, again, some significant appreciation for the concept does seem to exist in the West.

This, by the way, is why Bill's quote of McLuhan's statement that Westerners feel that two sides should be equal surprised me immensely. I still can't see where that idea comes from or how it could be supported, at least if it is meant to relate in any way to aesthetics.

Bill Spight · Post by **Bill Spight** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 9:18 pm

rat4000 wrote:This, by the way, is why Bill's quote of McLuhan's statement that Westerners feel that two sides should be equal surprised me immensely. I still can't see where that idea comes from or how it could be supported, at least if it is meant to relate in any way to aesthetics.

John observed that some Western artists in a Japanese calligraphy class had trouble because they tried to make the two sides of the characters equal. I recalled my reading as an undergraduate about the "dynamic asymmetry" of Chinese characters. I also mentioned that McLuhan pointed out that Western thought, including esthetics, became rationalized in modern times. I -- not McLuhan -- said that making the characters symmetrical might be an example of rationalization. (I did not mention it, but the Golden Ratio, BTW, is an example of asymmetrical rationalization.

) Neither I nor McLuhan said that Westerners feel that the two sides should be equal. John observed that in some Westerners.

rat4000 · Post by **rat4000** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:05 pm

Ah, sorry. I took "One example of this rationalization is the feeling that two sides should be equal" as the general statement that modern Westerners with their rationalized thinking feel that two sides should be equal.

While I'm posting, let me voice a vague concern about speaking about western and oriental people as though either group were homogenous. I know there have been studies that show that there is some difference between the groups but I don't know how large and diverse the study groups were. I'd be very curious whether e.g. carpenters, mathematicians and poets, or men and women, from the same country are any different in this regard. Does anyone know?

Cassandra · Post by **Cassandra** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 12:50 am

rat4000 wrote:In this vein, note also that all of the above paintings (particularly Fortuny's) make strong use of asymmetry. I do not know Japanese and am also unfamiliar with calligraphy (except for several old threads here), so I can't say how asymmetry is used in Japanese calligraphy specifically, but I would be really surprised if a Western artist's problem in writing characters was her inability to handle asymmetry. Is it possible that the people in the course you mentioned had some different problem? Perhaps a belief that writing was not art, and that a lack of symmetry was only welcome in art, or something similar.

Perhaps the members of the class lacked some explanations about the "laws" of writing / painting Japanese ?

I know some Ikebana-Ladies, who also practice Japanese calligraphy / shodô. We have to assume that these Ladies are specialists in "harmony", and also are well aware of the fact that "harmony" requires "a-symmetry".

However, the first astonishing issue that takes me by surprise is that the painted Kanji do not really fit a squared grid. This is true especially for Kanji that are a compound of -- let's say -- two elements. If the two elements are vertically oriented (one right, one left), the Kanji is too wide; if the two elements are horizontally oriented (one top, one bottom), the Kanji is too high.

By the way: There are Kanji with two vertically oriented elements, where both elements have 50 % of the Kanji's width each, but this is not the rule.

I think that it must be very difficult to write these Kanji with using ink, and a paint-brush; and I really admire these Ladies, who have so much patience, and stamina. One reasoning for the relative displacements described above might be a primary assumption that each stroke must have the same width, and also the same amount of "empty space" around it, which implies a minimal distance between the strokes.

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