Chun's artwork is genuine: prosecution
Chief prosecutor Bae Young-won, left, announces at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office in southern Seoul, Monday, that “Beautiful Woman” by the late artist Chun Kyung-ja is genuine after an investigation. Yonhap
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Chun Kyung-ja
The late artist Chun Kyung-ja’s “Beautiful Woman” was appraised as genuine by the prosecution Monday, putting an end to the largest forgery scandal in Korean art history since the painting surfaced in 1991.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office announced the results of the investigation, concluding that the techniques correspond with Chun’s style based on scientific methods, expert’s discernment and provenance.
Chun’s family, led by her second daughter Kim Jeong-hee, filed complaints against National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) officials, including director Bartomeu Mari, in June, claiming the museum assessed the artwork as authentic despite the artist’s denial.
The prosecution cleared five of them including director Mari of suspicion and charged a former MMCA official without detention for defaming the dead.
The prosecution asked experts to look at the painting and assess it with their eyes as well as employing scientific methods such as X-ray, far infrared, computer image analysis and DNA analysis and they judged that the painting has Chun’s characteristic brush strokes.
The painting in question was painted over several times and a rare stone color often used by the artist, but not reproducible by forgers, was applied. It also had embossed lines, invisible to the naked eye, a feature of Chun’s work.
It was modified during sketches and the prosecution said forged paintings usually do not have layers of different sketches beneath the final painting.
Nine appraisers appointed by the prosecution were also inclined to believe the painting was genuine as it has distinctive traits of Chun’s style such as brushstrokes and the stone color.
The prosecution also traced the provenance of “Beautiful Woman” and confirmed it came from Kim Jae-gyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) who assassinated President Park Chung-hee in 1979.
According to the prosecution, Chun gifted two paintings including “Beautiful Woman” to a KCIA executive in 1977. The executive’s wife, who had attended the same university as Kim Jae-gyu’s wife, gave those to Kim Jae-gyu. Later, Kim Jae-gyu’s property was confiscated and the art pieces were transferred to the MMCA in the end.
“We employed all kinds of appraisal methods to discern the authenticity of the painting, since it is one of Korea’s major counterfeit scandals lasting 25 years,” an official of the prosecution said.