The showpieces of art, antiques and artifacts amassed by the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee will fill museum rooms this year. Naturally, the trove donated to public museums will enrich art appreciation and perhaps lift standards. On the other hand, detractors say the motivation behind the historic act of munificence is dubious and the timing is curious.

The donation, announced by the Lee family last month, is part of plans to pay its inheritance tax bills. The family owes more than $10 billion in estate taxes. It is, by far, the largest amount ever in Korean history, and exceeds the 2020 economy of many small nations.

Currently, Lee Jae-yong, the late chairman’s only son, is serving a prison term for bribery. He is now the de facto leader of Samsung Group and pressure is mounting from business circles and the general public for a presidential pardon as turmoil escalates in the semiconductor industry, a pillar of Samsung.

The donation consists of 21,693 objects, including 60 state-designated treasures, gifted to the National Museum of Korea; 1,488 pieces of Korean and Western artwork to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; and 143 works to seven other museums.

The scale and scope are truly spectacular. The items given to the National Museum span the prehistoric eras to the end of the Joseon Dynasty in the early 20th century. They include paintings, ceramics, books and documents, metal crafts and stone objects. Modern artwork highlights include those by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, and broadly popular Korean artists such as Park Soo-keun, Lee Jung-seop and Chang Uc-chin.

Obviously, the staffs of the two major state museums are exhilarated with the centuries-old antiquity and stunning modern art showered on them. But there is little time to languish over any piece as they rush to prepare to open exhibitions of the donated pieces in July.

As for me, the Lee family’s announcement brought back memories of two momentous exhibitions at the Samsung-built Ho-Am Art Gallery in 1993-94: buncheong wares from the Joseon period and Buddhist paintings from the Goryeo period. These are the two areas where Koreans truly distinguished themselves in art history.

My recollections of these exhibitions -- both unprecedented in scale and significance up to that time -- probably are related to the apparent impact the Lee collection will have on the National Museum’s holdings in the two areas. As for buncheong, the museum has reportedly received over 400 works, four times the pre-donation number of this pottery type on hand.

The Ho-Am exhibition reawakened appreciation of buncheong. The simple and unpretentious wares, which formed a kind of bridge between the celebrated Goryeo celadon and Joseon porcelain, demonstrated nonchalant, modern aesthetics. Nearly forgotten in its homeland, buncheong fascinated Japanese tea enthusiasts of the 16th century, who named it “mishima” and adored it as ideal for their humble tea ceremony.

In the category of Buddhist paintings of the Goryeo period, “Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshvara,” or the Bodhisattva of Compassion with a Thousand Arms, from the Lee collection is known to be the first Goryeo Buddhist scroll painting the National Museum has ever acquired. This is unbelievable, but they say it’s true.

The Ho-Am exhibition of Goryeo Buddhist paintings, held from December 1993 to February 1994, was the first of its kind in Korea. It displayed 68 works, including gorgeous hanging scrolls of Buddhas, bodhisattvas and arhats, exquisite frontispieces of major sutras and illustrations of scriptural episodes, recalling a golden age of Buddhist civilization in East Asia.

Most hanging scrolls introduced in the exhibition were leased from Japan and France, with only several pieces coming from the collection of the Ho-Am Art Museum. They included two pieces, “Amitabha with Two Bodhisattvas” and “Ksitigarbha with Ten Judges of Hell,” which were bought from the Museum Yamato Bunkagan in Nara, Japan, in 1979.

It is widely acknowledged today that Buddhist painting flourished during the Goryeo Dynasty, alongside celadon, representing its resplendent aristocratic culture. However, all of the beautiful scrolls were lost in Korea in the ensuing centuries. Few people discussed the existence of such paintings at all. Many survived in Japan, however, vaguely known as works of Chinese masters.

In 1978, the Museum Yamato Bunkagan held an exhibition of Goryeo Buddhist paintings, presenting 52 hanging scrolls and 17 hand-copied frontispieces, accrediting the views of a handful of “dissident” Japanese scholars who spoke up on the true origin of those paintings which were carefully preserved in temples around Japan. The exhibition thus opened a “Pandora’s box.” A handful of Korean scholars visited the exhibition, and so did Lee Byung-chull, father of Lee Kun-hee and founder of Samsung Group.

Lee mounted an all-out effort to repatriate the lost paintings. Negotiations for the purchase of two paintings and their import procedures lasted a full year. Finally, in October 1979, the scroll paintings of Amitabha and Ksitigarbha returned home, through the Samsung trade office in the US. It was a “tolerable” route suggested by Japanese negotiators, who insisted the official buyer had to be an American, not a Korean.

Lee Byung-chull laid the foundation of the Lee Kun-hee collection. The father himself was a renowned collector and connoisseur of antique art, but it was the son and his wife, Hong Ra-hee, an art major at college, who expanded the collection with international perspective.

As such, the collection is a testimony to a family’s passion and dedication to art and culture that built up over eight decades, on the basis of their wealth. It is now time for our society to further enhance the collection’s value and benefit from its legacies, regardless of how the donation is perceived at the present moment and beyond any hasty agenda of individuals or political party. This in itself will be a huge task requiring research, preservation and presentation guided solely by expert knowledge. Then the nation will be able to enrich itself.


Lee Kyong-hee
Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. She is currently editor-in-chief of Koreana, a quarterly magazine of Korean culture and arts published by the Korea Foundation. -- Ed.