Executed man's wife denies son is art fraud

The son of Xia Junfeng, a recently executed street vendor who killed two urban management officers, or chengguan, was under suspicion of plagiarizing the paintings of Jimmy, a renowned Taiwanese artist.

Zhang Jing, Xia's wife, apologized to Jimmy through her Sina Weibo account Wednesday night, saying that she did not quite understand the concept of plagiarism in paintings.

Prior to that, Jimmy SPA, the corporate agent of Jimmy, posted a statement online that they were working on a plan to protect their legal rights.

However, the company announced through its own Sina Weibo account Thursday that they decided not to take legal action as the court may ask for a "subjective identification procedure," and the issue may affect Jimmy's creative work.

Xia's case was under national scrutiny since 2009, when he was sentenced to death, with Xia and his family insisting that he acted in self-defense after being beaten. The public also showed sympathy to his 13-year-old son, who is a talented painter.

However, public opinion has rapidly switched to blaming Xia's family for taking advantage of public sympathy. Soon after Xia's execution on September 25, some Net users posted comparisons of his son's paintings with Jimmy's.

Zhang said her son started to imitate Jimmy's work two years ago, but he would always add his own ideas, the Beijing Times reported Thursday.

Some Net users also helped to defend the boy, saying that "imitation" for paintings and plagiarism of written works are different.

A Beijing-based non-profit publisher helped Xia's son to publish a painting album in April and its 5,000 copies were sold out in July, at the price of 128 yuan ($21) each.

The money will be given to Zhang Jing and the families of the two deceased officers, and the institution is still working on the calculation of the funds obtained from the book sale.

"Plagiarism identification can be rather flexible when it enters the legal procedure, as it's very difficult to judge how much the artistic compositions from the two sides are similar, except when the copying is too obvious," Xu Xinming, a legal expert in intellectual property, told the Global Times, noting that plagiarizing others' works and publicizing them as their own works is illegal.