French art experts blast Seoul over ‘fake’ painting
The painting Beautiful Woman by one of South Korea’s most renowned artists, Chun Kyung-ja, has been the focus of a bizarre and decades-long dispute over its authenticity
The painting Beautiful Woman by one of South Korea’s most renowned artists, Chun Kyung-ja, has been the focus of a bizarre and decades-long dispute over its authenticity.
Before her death last year at the age of 91, Chun had repeatedly insisted that the 1971 portrait owned by the country’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) was not one of hers.
“Parents can recognise their children. That is not my painting,” she insisted.
The Prosecution’s denial of empirical evidence is akin to a DNA paternity test – for a child revealing that a man is in fact not his father – being disregarded in place of the mother’s testimony that the child must be the offspring of that man because she never had a relationship with another man
The museum is adamant that it is genuine, and in April a prosecutorial investigation was launched after one of Chun’s daughters filed a complaint. She accused former and current MMCA officials of hurting the artist’s reputation by promoting the painting as authentic.
