Law & Politics
Korean Court Rules in Bitter Dispute Over Patron’s 188 Alleged Art Loans
Jeong Hee-ja should receive just three works, a Seoul judge determined.
Jeong Hee-ja should receive just three works, a Seoul judge determined.
Jo Lawson-Tancred ShareShare This Article
Thirteen years after a leading Korean art collector first asked the museum she founded to return nearly 200 works that she said were on loan, a court has weighed in. The verdict is a rather mixed bag.
The ruling orders the Wooyang Museum of Art in Gyeongju, South Korea, to return just three works to Jeong Hee-ja: two monumental Nam June Paik pieces from his 1989–91 “My Faust” series and a Sigmar Polke. There was insufficient evidence to link her with the remaining 185, it determined.
A leading hotelier, Jeong created the institution as the Art Sonje Museum in 1991 in Gyeongju, a city on the southeastern edge of South Korea that was once the capital of the ancient kingdom of Silla. (Jeong also created the Art Sonje Center in Seoul in 1998, which continues to operate under that name.)
The museum was originally operated by Daewoo Development, a company controlled by Jeong’s late husband, Kim Woo-chong, the founding chairman of Daewoo Group. In 2012, Daewoo Development was acquired at auction by Wooyang Industrial Development, which renamed the museum.
Jeong began her campaign to reclaim the artworks in 2013, when she first contacted Wooyang Industrial Development, according to a report in the Chosun Daily. She said that she had purchased the art with “personal funds” and loaned them on the understanding that “they could be reclaimed at any time.” The company responded by requesting “objective evidence” that she owned the works, and later returned nine works to Jeong and her daughter. Jeong then filed suit.
Judge Kim Chang-mo ordered the return of the three works based on evidence provided by the art dealer who had sold them to Jeong, testimony from a curator at the museum, and bank transfer records.
Jeong’s claim rested principally on a collection-cataloguing method employed during her tenure as the museum’s director. Jeong said that she indicated her ownership of artworks by assigning the code “M” (short for “museum”) on record cards. However, according to the museum curator’s testimony, this same code was also used when the work’s owner was unknown.
The court found that “M” codes had been assigned to some artworks “arbitrarily,” and therefore the code “cannot be conclusively linked to Jeong’s ownership.”
Wooyang Industrial Development has filed an appeal in an effort to retain the Paiks and the Polke.
The dispute over 188 artworks is just one chapter in a much larger legal battle between the Wooyang Industrial Development and the family behind the dissolved Daewoo Group.