This summer, a distinctly scholarly controversy has thrown fuel to the fire of the already overheated Chinese contemporary art scene, with two  distinguished art historians embroiled in a lawsuit over something that in New York in the 1970s would have been resolved with a fist fight: an art theory.

Gao Minglu, a Harvard art history PhD teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, is being sued by his longtime friend Liu Xiangdong, an art critic and a professor at China's Huaqiao University, for allegedly plagiarizing a complex theory that Liu claims to have initiated back in the 1980s. The case returned to court in Beijing last Monday, though neither of the litigants made an appearance.

The contested theory — which owes more to the near-mathematical formulations of Neo-Confucian philosophy than it does to the more literary tradition of Western art scholarship — is called Yi Pai, or the "Yi School," in which yi is a synthesis of li, shi, and xing, or “principle," "concept, and "likeness,” a notion that finds its origin in the 9th century Tang Dynasty. In the introduction to the catalogue for his 2009 exhibition "Yi Pai: Thirty Years of Chinese Abstraction," Gao wrote that Yi Pai is intended to "establish a non-representational, non-substitutional, and anti-separation mode of thinking" about art that harnesses metaphysical methodology to understand issues of abstraction and representation in Chinese art.

In his lawsuit, Liu claims that this theory was stolen from essays that he gave Gao in 2007 for an exhibition his friend was curating.Liu alleges that beginning in 2008, Gao published a series of essays and curated a number of exhibitions that hinged on Yi Pai, which shares the same thesis, glossary, and structure of theoretical arguments of Liu’s theory — which he called Xiang Xiang Zhuyi, which roughly translates to the same thing as Yi in Chinese.

The two academics first met each other at the monumental "China Avant-Garde Exhibition” held in 1989 at Beijing's National Art Museum, the first show to exhibit contemporary art in the country. At the time, Liu was a pioneering artist in China's rising art scene, while Gao, an editor of China's leading fine-arts magazine Meishu, was also a progressive advocate for the new art.

They became close friends and began frequently working together on curatorialprojects and exhibitions, with their collaborative relationship continuing even after Gao left for the United States in 1991. Settling in Cambridge, Gao quickly became a globally influential authority on Chinese contemporary art, curating important exhibitions and coauthoring books with such esteemed scholars as Wu Hung, Hou Hanru, and Leo Ou-fan Lee. In 1998, while still a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he curated “Inside/Out: New Chinese Art,” the first major show of Chinese contemporary art in the U.S., held simultaneously at New York's Asia Society and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. In this exhibition, which introduced many soon-to-be-famous Chinese artists to American audiences, Liu's work was featured alongside those by Gu Wenda and Xu Bing. 

Now the two-decade-long friendship of Gao and Liu has been rent asunder  by the lawsuit, which has turned the two into foes overnight. Liu’s lawyer, Sun Haichao, has stated that he is confident that they have gathered sufficient evidence of intellectual-property infringement by Gao to win the case. Gao refused to allow himself to be placed in the defendant's seat, declaring that he would make a countercharge against Liu. The case, filed last Monday, may not be so easy to decide. Intellectual property law in China only protects the detailed expression of a work, not the ideas contained within it — a nicety that works in Gao's favor. And unfortunately for Liu, the concept-freighted words li, shi, and xing — which appear in his essays published in the 1980s — are commonly used terms.