Park Su-geun’s 1961 work “People at the Marketplace” will be auctioned on Nov. 21 at K Auction’s November sale.

Park is a Korean painter known for his artworks that portray the daily life of the Korean people in the mid-20th century.

The estimated price for “People at the Marketplace” is 4 billion won-5.5 billion won ($3.5 million-$4.9 million), the auction house said. The work was owned by a foreign collector for about 40 years before it was recently sold to a Korean collector, it added.

The highest price ever paid for one of Park’s works was some 4.5 billion won for “A Wash Place,” an auction record set in 2007.

However, the 1950 artwork “A Wash Place” became mired in a forgery controversy, and two years of legal wrangling ended with the Seoul Central District Court ruling in 2009 that the work was authentic, based on Korean Art Appraisal Board’s reviews.

Eight works by Kim Whan-ki, whose work currently holds the record for the most expensive Korean artwork sold at auction, will also be on the block at the upcoming auction. They are “8-XI-69 #133” (1969), “VI-VII-66” (1966), “22-X-73 #325” (1973), “Birds,” “Les Figures” and three untitled works.

K Auction’s November sale will also feature works by internationally acclaimed artists such as Ai Weiwei, Robert Indiana and Yayoi Kusama. A total of 203 items, including traditional artworks, will go under the hammer. The estimated worth of the items reaches some 21.1 billion won, the auction house said.

By Shim Woo-hyun (ws@heraldcorp.com)