Ceng Fanzhi's Leopard: Misappropriation or Plagiarism?

"Brahma paints a leopard, and the dragon pats a tiger." This is a new buzzword on the Internet recently. The reason is that Ceng Fanzhi's oil painting Snow Leopard, which was auctioned at Christie's in Hong Kong, was found to be suspected of copying the photography of Snow Leopard by foreign photographer Steve Winter, which won the British Wildlife Photography Award in 2008 and was published in National Geographic magazine. As a result, some people compared Ceng Fanzhi's painting of leopards to Zhou Zhenglong's painting of tigers, and a new network language "painting leopards in numerous places and dragons painting tigers" was born. Some people may think that Ceng Fanzhi did not plagiarize, but adopted the common "misappropriation" technique in contemporary art. So, what is misappropriation?

Misappropriation is a common phenomenon in artistic creation. Simply put, it refers to the elements borrowed in the creation of works, which occur from time to time in literature, music, visual arts and other fields. As far as visual art is concerned, misappropriation means properly absorbing and drawing lessons from various elements and forms in human visual culture, re-examining, evaluating, interpreting, changing, imitating, supplementing and so on. Artists reconstruct and combine images, styles, concepts, symbols and other elements borrowed from other cultures and history to produce new works. Misappropriation in the traditional sense and misappropriation in the modern sense have their own different meanings.

Misappropriation in the traditional sense is always accompanied by the development of art, and the process of style communication is actually the process of misappropriation. A famous example in ancient times is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. In the era when this work was produced, many people painted its variants, including Raphael, a great painter like Leonardo da Vinci. They drew lessons from the new style of female portrait initiated by Mona Lisa, including three-quarters of sideways posture, looking straight into the eyes of the audience and other factors, and painted portraits for other women. In art history or art criticism, this phenomenon is often considered that Leonardo da Vinci's artistic innovation influenced the creation of other painters and changed the "fashion" of portrait painting at that time, which is one of the important reasons why he became a great painter: creating new styles and attracting followers. Excellent followers, while learning from others' innovations, integrate their own unique methods to solve special problems in the picture and form new innovations, so Raphael can become Raphael, not a follower of Leonardo da Vinci.

But it is the exploration of a group of modern artists in the early 20th century, among which Picasso and Braque are the representatives. Their works are called "comprehensive cubism" by later generations. They borrowed a lot of non-artistic elements and pasted them on the canvas, presenting the objects directly to the audience, which triggered a discussion on the significance and importance of artistic reproduction. Duchamp went further on the road of misappropriation. He added the Mona Lisa with two beards and named the urinal "Spring", which directly challenged the "originality" cherished in art history. In this sense, these modern artists, no matter what art school they were classified by later generations, questioned, reflected, challenged and rebelled against the existing artistic concepts by misappropriating this way, constantly exploring and exploring the boundaries of art, and breaking through this boundary in an extreme form.

In modern and contemporary art, there are indeed many artists who incur lawsuits for embezzlement. Andy warhol, Jeff Coons and others were accused by photographers of stealing photos. Nowadays, people's awareness of copyright is getting stronger and stronger, and it seems that embezzlement, which was originally separated from plagiarism, often encounters embarrassing situations. Snow Leopard, who returned to Ceng Fanzhi, seems to be misappropriating in the traditional or modern sense. The picture itself has not been recreated on the basis of others' innovation, nor has it created new meanings with borrowed elements, let alone questioned the concept of originality itself. Even if there is, this kind of questioning itself has been an artistic exploration completed at the beginning of the last century.

Perhaps, there is another meaning of misappropriation that is not mentioned above, that is, paying tribute to the master through misappropriation ... Is it too rampant to pay tribute to the master in China's contemporary art creation? The flood made us unconsciously become a big country in all fields.