Is he fake?

   Here is big news in Japan.

  One of Japan's leading artists, Yoshihiko Wada, was questioned on suspitions that he had copied his works from Italian artist Albert Sughi's works.

Sixty-six year old Yoshihiko Wada won an Education Minister's Prize in this spring's art recommendations. It was a big award .  The man that is wearing a yellow-red necktie is Yoshihiko in the picture.

This plagiarism incident ( tosaku mondai ) is sort of funny to me.  Yoshihiko Wada has denied the alligations strongly.  However, his work looks really similar to an Italian artist Albert Sughi's in my opinion.   This work is not only the one that has close similarity.  Have a look at this one, this one too!      Over 20 of his works were clamined as imitations.    You could dig out more~    His replicating works seem  to have started from the early 1990s.

Despite that, Yoshihiko Wada said, " I have known Albert for a long time since I went to study in Italy in the 1970s. I recieved artistic influence from him and doing study and design work together with him, but the works are not stolen!" ( Albert to kyodo seisaku shita mono de, tosaku dewa nai ).

Albert Sughi said, " I never knew that he was producing works like this. They are stolen". Albert even did not know that Yoshihiko was an artist ( yoshihiko ga gaka dato wa shirana katta)., he thought Yoshihiko was his fan and let him to take pictures of his works.

Yoshihiko was born in Mie prefecture and studied at Tokyo Geijutsu university that was the best school for artists of all Japan.

It was revealed by an anonymous submission ( tokumei no shirase ) in April this year.  What do you think?  His works do not look to be original by all appearance to me...    Yoshihiko is still saying that everybody will know that those works are different....( Sughi-shi no sakuhin to jibun no mono towa onaji dewa nai to itte iru ).

It is really disgraceful for the field of art of Japan ( nihon no gaijyutsu-kai ni totte, fu-meiyo na koto da).  

To a Japanese artist, being acused of stealing is a big deal and risks ruining his or her career forever. That's why the story is such big news here!