Corporate Art or Corporate Scandal for Samsung

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Jan 5th 2008 at 3:02PM

The hunger for art, or more aptly his wife's hunger for art, can get a man in trouble. Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung, allegedly used over $64 million from a corporate slush fund to buy art for his wife Ra Hee Hong Lee who is director-general of the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. The big mystery is, where has the art gone? It hasn't been exhibited in Korea and its whereabouts is presently unknown. Samsung has denied the allegations but the National Assembly has approved an independent investigation. The move has caused other Korean corporations to stop buying art and caused the country's two main auction houses to report a 20% drop in sales.

One painting in question is Roy Lichtenstein's Happy Tears, 1964, bought at Christie's New York in 2002 for $7,159,500, a record price for the artist at the time. The painting is said to have been bought at the auction on behalf of the chairman's wife by Hong Seong-won, director of the Seoul-based Seomi Gallery. Kim Yong-chul, head of the legal department of the Samsung Group Restructuring Office from 1997 to 2004, has released a full list of the art alleged to have been bought with money from the Samsung slush fund as well as details of payments made to Christie's that according to The Art Newspaper, includes 30 paintings and photographs including works by Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter and David Hockney. Samsung supplied The Art Newspaper with a statement saying that the allegations are groundless and that the list is of works of art purchased by Seomi Gallery alone and that neither Mrs Hong Lee nor the Samsung Museum of Art were involved in the purchase of "Happy Tears." Where is "Happy Tears" now? Seomi Gallery first said they sold"Happy Tears" to a private collector and then quickly retracted that and told Korean reporters she still had the painting but that other works on the list have been sold to various collectors.

Tags: corporate art, korea, lee kun-hee, roy lichtenstein, samsung