The Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (Lacma) has come underneath fireplace for exhibiting artworks characterised as fakes by a panel of Korean artwork specialists.
Works by the late Korean artists Lee Jung-seop and Park Soo-keun featured within the lately closed exhibition Korean Treasures From the Chester and Cameron Chang Assortment had been recognized as counterfeits throughout an official appraisal session at Lacma. Consultants Hong Solar-pyo (professor emeritus at Ewha Womans College, Seoul), Lee Dong-kook (director of the Gyeonggi Provincial Museum, Yongin), Tae Hyun-seon (curator on the Leeum Museum of Artwork, Seoul) and Sunhee Kim (former director of the Busan Museum of Artwork) concluded that 4 of the works on show couldn’t be moderately attributed to their said creators. In line with studies by the South Korean every day newspaper The JoongAng Ilbo, the specialists stated that Lee’s A Bull and a Youngster and Crawling Kids and Park’s Waikiki and Three Girls and Youngster are fakes. The panel additional criticised the museum for rushed provenance and a “lack of a common understanding of Korean artwork”.
The Korean Treasures exhibition highlighted 35 works donated to Lacma by Chester Chang and his son Cameron, collectors of an intensive trove of Korean works. The authenticity of the items first grew to become a public query in February through a JoongAng unique report.
In an announcement emailed to ARTnews, a consultant for Lacma stated: “Lacma has confidence within the scientific findings that our analysis has produced to this point, and we’re dedicated to persevering with to conduct further analysis on works within the Chester and Cameron Chang Assortment. Additional contextualisation of those works and their art-historical significance will seem in future Lacma publications, each on-line and in print. As is long-standing follow, the works in Lacma’s everlasting assortment are constantly studied as new discoveries are made and analysis progresses”.
