Chinese art professor sacked after award-winning poster series found to be plagiarised
Fan Yu has lost his job and his Red Dot design award after it emerged he had borrowed many elements of a work by British illustrator Russell Cobb
A Chinese art professor has been sacked after he was found to have plagiarised the work of a British illustrator for a poster series that won him an international award, a mainland newspaper reports.
The Xian Academy of Fine Arts said Fan Yu was dismissed from his job on Friday after the school confirmed the plagiarism, Chengdu Business Daily reported on Saturday.
Fan’s artwork won the Red Dot: Best of the Best award for communication design in October, but has been stripped of the prize following the revelation, according to the report.
The Red Dot Design Award is an international competition with prizes in categories covering product and communication design that started in Germany in 1955.
The description of Fan’s winning four-part poster series, Open Air Cinema National Museum, said it was designed for the Xian Concert Hall and the drawings “explore how the brain, the ‘strange cavity’, works and processes information with its countless cells and lobes”.