Renowned Chinese Artist Guilty of Plagiarism
By Annabel Preston
Portrait of YE YONGQING. Courtesy the Asia Art Center, Beijing/Taipei.
After a five-year legal battle, Chinese artist Ye Yongqing has been found guilty of plagiarizing the work of Belgian artist Christian Silvain. The Beijing Intellectual Property Court upheld a previous ruling from 2023 and ordered the artist to pay EUR 650,000 (USD 670,500) in damages—a record sum for a case relating to fine arts in China. Ye has also been ordered to issue a public apology in the Global Times, a major Chinese newspaper. The court warned the artist that failure to comply with the ruling could result in imprisonment.
Ye has been copying Silvain’s work since he visited an exhibition by the Belgian painter in Paris in 1990. In the three decades since, Ye’s paintings have sold for monumental sums—hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Silvain’s—at major auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and many of his works are owned by prominent collectors including American billionaire Bill Gates and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The case has been ongoing since November 2019, after the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad first brought attention to the similarities between Ye and Silvain’s works. Following the initial accusations, Ye was dismissed from his position as a professor at Chongqing’s prestigious Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. His damaged reputation has prevented him from having any exhibitions since 2018, and his work has been removed from several museums.
As the first foreign artist to win a plagiarism case against a Chinese artist, Silvain expressed relief at the verdict, describing it as “the end of a long battle” after years of witnessing Ye’s garnering substantial profit and success from the plagiarism of his work.
Annabel Preston is an assistant editor at ArtAsiaPacific.
