Daughter reveals Chun Kyung-ja’s secrets
“‘Beautiful Woman’ is not painted by Chun Kyung-ja,” said the late artist’s second daughter Kim Jeong-hee, also known as Sumita Kim, who published the book “Chun Kyung-ja Code,” citing five reasons that the artwork in question is fake.
She aesthetically analyzed Chun’s other paintings from the same period with Clifford Chieffo, professor emeritus at Georgetown University and her husband and artist Muhn Bum-gang and compared it with “Beautiful Woman.”
Kim is an artist and professor at Montgomery College and modeled for her mother often, and thus knows Chun’s artistic style and habits very well.
According to Kim’s research, Chun painted sharp lines in the iris of the eyes in her portraits, but the iris of “Beautiful Woman” lacks the lines. Chun also intentionally does not depict the philtrum and the U-shaped curve of the upper lip in her paintings, but the woman in “Beautiful Woman” certainly has a philtrum and strong curve of the upper lip.
“Unlike most Oriental colored painters, Chun did not make rough sketches with charcoal, but started with coloring with brushes. The tomography of ‘Beautiful Woman’ revealed many lines of the rough sketch beneath the color and this is a proof of being forged,” Kim said at a press conference Thursday.
“The fifth code is the rarest and the most significant. We call this code the ‘Secret of Spoon,’ because Chun left distinct traces of rubbing in the middle of the forehead of her portrait paintings. However, there is no such mark of rubbing in the ‘Beautiful Woman.’ It was a secret method of the artist and it is impossible for the forger to imitate such a unique technique,” Kim said.
Chun passed away in 2015, but the long-pending controversy over “Beautiful Woman,” a painting claimed to be Chun’s, grew larger and larger after her death as her surviving family tried to clear the artist’s name from the forgery issue.
“Beautiful Woman,” a portrait of a woman with flowers in her hair, is currently in possession of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). The 1977 painting was known to have been painted by the late Chun (1924-2015), but the artist claimed it was a counterfeit in 1991, stirring up the largest forgery scandal in Korea’s modern art history.
“The museum first apologized for possessing a fake artwork in their collection and not appraising properly when they acquired the painting from the confiscated collection of Kim Jae-gyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) who assassinated President Park Chung-hee in 1979. However, the museum officials immediately shifted their position when the news of the fake painting was reported,” Kim recalled. “I think it was related to authority of the state museum and it got dirtier as the Galleries Association of Korea, which was close to the museum, was involved in the appraisal.”
The long-pending controversy surfaced again in 2015 as her family filed a suit against the MMCA for assessing the artwork as authentic despite the artist’s denial. The prosecution ruled the painting genuine last December, but the family protested against the decision and lodged an appeal.
Meanwhile, the painting is on display without a caption at the MMCA Gwacheon’s “Cracks in the Concrete: from the MMCA Collection” exhibition. The family condemned the museum for displaying a fake artwork.