Painted plagiarism of a push-up photograph

Here’s an oil painting done by Li Yueliang (李跃亮) in 2003. It was shown at a recent exhibition of sports art held alongside the National Games in Jinan:

Li Yueliang’s 2003 painting, When I Was Young (我小时候)

Here’s an earlier photograph taken by Hu Wugong (胡武功) in 1996:

Hu Wugong’s 1996 photo, Push-Ups (俯卧撑)

A member of the Professional Photographers of America identified the plagiarism in a short post submitted to the Fengniao website:

At the Seventh Chinese Sports Art Exhibition held recently in Jinan, Shandong Province, the oil painting When I Was Young by an artist named Li Yueliang from Zhejiang Province caught my attention, as familiar framing, characters, and setting all appeared before my eyes. Wasn’t this “Push-Ups,” a photograph taken by Hu Wugong in the 1990s? Hu is the chairman of the Shaanxi Province Photographers Association and a professor at the Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology. His photograph was taken in the Minleyuan slums in Xi’an in 1996. More than a decade later, how had it turned into an oil painting on display at a national art exhibition?

So I called up Hu Wugong to ask whether he had assigned rights, and he answered in the negative. He also sent me the original, and I put the photograph next to the painting and discovered that apart from the artist and date, everything else about the two pieces was identical. The painter’s skill at copying was extraordinary — no detail seemed to escape his notice. He merely substituted pigments for silver salts to clone a photograph with brush-strokes. We all know that for painter and photographer alike, the achievement of an artistic work should be a result of involvement in life, and a painter cut off from the world, appropriating the results of someone else’s involvement in life and using a copy as his own original work is incredibly sad, ridiculous, and shameful! Such shameful plagiarism should be criticized and wiped out by us all.

I urge my colleagues in the world of photography and fine art to open up a discussion for people to air their opinions, so that this phenomenon does not spread, desecrating art!

Via Wang Xiaofeng, who presents the two images with a snide remark about how easy it is to simulate an oil painting using Photoshop.