#0 - March 5, 2009, 9:42 p.m.
For anyone who is wondering what is going on here, get to the Blizzard Homepage and check the recently updated Fan Art, you will see a picture named "Carrying the Glory" by Zhengnan Liu. For anyone who is familiar with a fantasy artist Azazel who posted most of his artwork at http://azazel1944.deviantart.com/ using ID Azazel1944 will tell that Azazel's artwork was ninja'ed by "Zhengnan Liu".
This picture was named "Lothyus and Tomei" and was posted on January 25, 2008 at http://azazel1944.deviantart.com/, which was originally posted on his Chinese blog http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4a6b260101008aul.html on January 21, 2008. If you go and check all his artwork on both sites, you will tell that it is his art style from especially female body shape and facial structure. He didn't submit any of his artwork to Blizzard Fan Art and none of his artwork has been displayed in Blizzard Fan Art Gallery.
Note that Azazel and most of his real life friends in China don't have US server accounts and it is not easy for them to contact Blizzard directly. I talked with them online and got confirmed that Azazel's real name is Shuang Wu (Wu Shuang is shown underneath his ID at his deviantart website as it is a Chinese tradition to put given name after familiy name) and he never used "Zhengnan Liu" anywhere as his identification.
Right now there are already two threads discussing this in General Forum:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15443529999&sid=1
https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15443290585&sid=1
It is obvious that someone else ninja'ed this picture and submitted to BLizzard Fan Art Gallery using the name "Zhengnan Liu".Azazel is frustrated.
He is an amazing talented artist and he has been uploading his artwork without putting a logo or anything into it that proves he is the author because simply he just didn't want to break the beauty of his art. He loves this game and wants to share all his experience with it, especially by using fine art outside the game. That's about it.
But now when someone else stole this piece of art and submitted to Fan Art Gallery, I suggest Blizzard to look into this. If this had happened somewhere else on the other website, it would be somewhat understandable that Blizzard has a reason to not care much about it(which I still thinkBlizzard should care). However, it is now happening on Blizzard's own site where a picture that has been known to a lot of art fans already is now claimed by another person and the very theft just got credit for making this piece of art.
I think the point of Fan Art Gallery is to encourage talented artists and award their fantastic work. However every artist would feel the same way as Azazel though they are not the "victims" right now if Blizzard just let this go. And what's more it is about integrity. If that was created by Azazel, then it is Azazel's art and should be tagged as his real name. No argument here. The whole point of my writing this wall of text is to request Blizzard to do what it should be done. Since this picture has already been accepted by Blizzard, Blizzard shoud give the credit back to Azazel.
**If the author(Azazel in this case) needs to contact Blizzard, can Blizzard let me know what the contact information is, preferred email in this case as he doesn't have US server account and will not be able to post here anyway.
