Chinese NFT project Bored Wukong accused of monkey business

[Pagla]

Chinese NFT project Bored Wukong attracted its fair share of bad publicity last week, following plagiarism accusations that started circulating on popular messaging app WeChat, reported South China Morning Post. 

Accused of plagiarizing Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Bored Wukong creator Wang Wendong insists that the art is original and that his monkeys have no connection to Yuga Labs’ apes.

Awfully familiar
The article, which received more than 243,000 views on the popular messaging app WeChat, was cited by several Chinese news outlets. In it, the authors called out Bored Wukong for appropriating design elements, such as the facial features of Bored Apes.

According to the project’s website, Wang Wendong is a lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Wendong’s NFT collection in question features different impersonations of Sun Wukong, or Monkey King–a legendary character from the classical Chinese novel “Journey to the West.”

The artist defended his NFT avatars on WeChat, arguing that the face shape of his monkeys is different from that of Bored Apes, as he claimed to have manually drawn each of them–making sure that every monkey comes with unique swag.

More Information