Museum Head Illegally Donated Cultural Asset
By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
The head of the National Museum of Korea may have illegally taken a piece of cultural property out of the country about a decade ago, Rep. Jung Jong-bok of the Grand National Party said Thursday.
According to Jung, Kim Hong-nam, director of the museum, donated a burnished red piece of earthenware to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998 when she was head of the Ewha Womans University Museum.
The museum displayed a sign with the earthen jar, indicating: ``Gift of Hongnam Kim, to commemorate the opening of the Arts of Korea Gallery, 1998.''
``The jar, suspected of having been made in the late Bronze Age in the fourth century B.C., has been well preserved. There are only five of its kind in Korea, so its value as a cultural asset is very high,'' Jung said. He said he had not found out where Kim obtained the jar.
According to the law on cultural assets preservation at the time, those who took unregistered cultural properties overseas had to get approval from the culture minister and the sending of such properties overseas as gifts was prohibited.
``However, Kim did not get approval from the then culture minister, and her taking of the jar was not reported to the Korea Customs Service. This is a clear violation of the law,'' Jung said.
If the law at that time were applied, Kim would have been subject to a minimum three years in jail and the jar confiscated.
Jung said the nation did not know that the property had been on display at the New York museum for a decade.
``Even if Kim obtained the jar in a foreign country as an individual and donated it to the museum, she is morally responsible as she, an expert of cultural properties, donated the highly valuable cultural asset to a foreign museum, not a Korean one,'' Jung claimed.
He urged Kim to step down from the top position of the national museum.