Mantifang has added a dedicated, source-based section on Korean garden art — palace grounds, temple complexes, and the traditions behind them, rather than one flat idea of “Korean style.” On KoiTalk, the same has been done for Japanese garden art, the landscape in which koi have always lived.

That raises a deeper question Hugo is now sitting with: in 612, an immigrant from Baekje built a garden at the Japanese imperial court — a composition featuring Mount Sumeru and a bridge. How much of what we now call Japanese garden art first passed through Korea?

“Garden art is no longer merely a convergence among different sites, but one of the connections that reveals why they together form a constellation.”

Miroshaki and The Jijang Fractal touch the same thread — Miroshaki in the water and planting itself, Jijang Fractal in the philosophy that shaped why a garden, a pond, or a temple was built the way it was.

Korean Culture & Garden Art
·
Baekje: tombs, temples, river memory
·
Japanese Garden Art on KoiTalk
·
Miroshaki
·
The Jijang Fractal

South Korea’s summer heat reached parts of Gyeonggi province at its highest warning level this year. Between the trees, the water, and the shade of Baedagol Forest, the heat feels different than it does on concrete and asphalt — a place that, on the hottest days, becomes less about gardens, culture, or history, and more simply somewhere older residents can sit where the sun isn’t constantly reflected back by the city.

Baedagol

After some thirty years in the Arcen Castle Gardens, the Holland Koi Show has relocated to Bloemenpark Appeltern, where the 2026 edition takes place on August 15 and 16. Arcen and the show had become nearly synonymous — but Appeltern and Arcen have worked together for more than twenty-five years already, which is part of why Hugo reads this as a continuation, not an ending.

Hugo was there from the beginning: one of the founders of the Nishikigoi Association of the Netherlands, and an organiser of the first Dutch koi days, held in 1993 on what heavy rain turned into a muddy field in Arcen. More than five thousand people came anyway. The show that grew from that field is now, by its own description, the largest koi show in the world by scale and attendance — and the Netherlands can now support more than one: the separate European Koi Show ran again in Oldenzaal in May 2026.

“An event so strongly tied to one location that Arcen and the show almost bore the same name ultimately proved that it did not need that specific location to continue existing. People, fish, knowledge, and mutual competition have simply moved along with it.”

Holland Koi Show
·
The first Holland Koi Show, 1993
·
KoiTalk