Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Huang Chien-pin (黃建賓) on Monday said the main visual design employed at President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration ceremony might have been “plagiarized,” but the designer insisted that the work was an original recreation.
The main visual design used at Monday’s ceremony and on event badges is “nearly identical” to the work of artist Anna Berbiela and French painter Francois Morellet, Huang wrote on social media.
Huang included in the post photographs and illustrations of the colorful linear designs at Lai’s inauguration ceremony and the foreign artists’ works to “highlight their similarities.”
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
The ceremony’s badge logo and a work submitted to a logo design competition five years ago for a Kentucky-based veterinary clinic named “Dogwood Veterinary Clinic” were similar, Huang said, adding that the former “resembles [the latter] to the point of plagiarism.”
On Sunday, a poster wrote on Professional Technology Temple — an online bulletin board, that there was reason to question the originality of the inauguration ceremony’s main visual design.
Yen Design founder Yen Po-chun (顏伯駿), whose company provided the design for the ceremony, yesterday denied the accusations, saying that colorful lines as a design element have a long tradition and are widely used in the works of the Bauhaus school and modernists.
His company “intended [the style of colorful lines] to showcase the new atmosphere accompanying the presidential inauguration ceremony, rather than to plagiarize the work of others,” Yen said.
As for the badge logo, the company “remade” it to its current look while basing the idea on material it purchased and was authorized for commercial use, he said.
Yen’s design team was also responsible for the visual design of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Paris Cultural Olympiad.
This is the second controversy over alleged design plagiarism involving government institutions in the past two weeks.
A dragon-like character in an immersive puzzle game promoted by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature was said to have been copied from the work of Chinese cartoonist Nora (童年), which the museum initially denied in a Facebook post on May 10.
However, on Thursday last week, the museum said it was informed by Popworld Inc, which designed the character, that the figure was not its brainchild, with Popworld Inc also issuing an apology for the situation.
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