The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has come under fire for exhibiting works of art characterised as fakes by a panel of Korean art experts.
Works by the late Korean artists Lee Jung-seop and Park Soo-keun featured in the recently closed exhibition Korean Treasures From the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection were identified as counterfeits during an official appraisal session at Lacma. Experts Hong Sun-pyo (professor emeritus at Ewha Womans University, Seoul), Lee Dong-kook (director of the Gyeonggi Provincial Museum, Yongin), Tae Hyun-seon (curator at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul) and Sunhee Kim (former director of the Busan Museum of Art) concluded that four of the works on display could not be reasonably attributed to their stated creators. According to reports by the South Korean daily newspaper The JoongAng Ilbo, the experts said that Lee’s A Bull and a Child and Crawling Children and Park’s Waikiki and Three Women and Child are fakes. The panel further criticised the museum for rushed provenance and a “lack of a general understanding of Korean art”.
The Korean Treasures exhibition highlighted 35 works donated to Lacma by Chester Chang and his son Cameron, collectors of an extensive trove of Korean works. The authenticity of the pieces first became a public question in February via a JoongAng exclusive report.
In a statement emailed to ARTnews, a representative for Lacma said: “Lacma has confidence in the scientific findings that our research has produced to date, and we are committed to continuing to conduct additional research on works in the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection. Further contextualisation of these works and their art-historical significance will appear in future Lacma publications, both online and in print. As is long-standing practice, the works in Lacma’s permanent collection are continuously studied as new discoveries are made and research progresses”.
