hankyoreh

Kim Keon-hee, People Power Party presidential nominee Yoon Seok-youl’s wife, departs from her home in Seoul’s Seocho District on Wednesday to go to her office. (Yonhap News)

It was learned Thursday that Kim Keon-hee, the wife of People Power Party presidential nominee Yoon Seok-youl, falsely claimed to have won an award in an art competition on a CV she submitted in 2001 for a lecturer position at Hallym Polytechnic University.

Coming on the heels of allegations that she also falsified a work history at the Korea Association of Game Industry, known also as K-Games, the latest revelations about her false claim to an art accolade is expected to feed a growing controversy about other fraudulent aspects of her CV.

A copy of Kim’s CV provided by Hallym Polytechnic University to the office of Democratic Party lawmaker An Min-suk showed a handwritten reference to her having been awarded second runner-up honors at the Misul Segye Grand Prize Exhibition in May 1995.

But the Hankyoreh’s examination of Issue 129 of the art monthly Misul Segye from August 1995, which included a list of the 229 winners, showed that Kim was not listed among them either under her current name or under her previous name, Kim Myeong-sin.

At the sixth Misul Segye Grand Prize Exhibition in 1995, where Kim claimed to have been honored, a total of 1,232 artworks were exhibited in areas including Korean painting, Western painting and sculpture. One grand prize winner was named, along with one runner-up, six second runners-up, 51 special selectees, and 170 selectees.

The Hankyoreh also examined lists of winners of the same competition in the years 1994 and 1996, but Kim’s name was not present there either.

The Misul Segye exhibition is organized by Misul Segye, an art journal founded in 1984.

After submitting her CV listing the award, Kim was employed at Hallym Polytechnic University as a lecturer in the applied computer science program from February 2001 to February 2004.

In a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh, Kim said, “This was all so long ago that I don’t remember any of it at all.”

“At the time, I’d won a major honor by being selected for the Grand Art Exhibition. That would have been enough, and I would have had no reason to lie about having won another award besides that,” she added.

“I’m not sure if I miswrote it or what,” she said.

An excerpt of an exhibition brochure for “Physical Landscape” in which Kim Keon-hee submitted artwork in August 2003 under her previous name. Under her name, she has listed that she was part of the 2003 exhibition “Portrate” at the Samsung Museum of Art.

Kim was also found to have falsified her exhibition history in a catalog for one of her exhibitions.

The Hankyoreh recently acquired information about “Physical Landscape,” an exhibition for which she submitted artwork in August 2003 while she was still going by her previous name. Thirty-eight artists took part in the exhibition, which was associated with the 2003 Incheon Media Art Biennale held on Aug. 19–31 of that year at the cultural center of the Federation of Artistic and Cultural Organizations of Korea’s Incheon branch.

The exhibition brochure included plates of major works by the participating artists, along with their academic history, awards, and past exhibitions. At the top of her listing of awards and exhibitions, Kim included “the 2003 special exhibition ‘Portrate’ at the Samsung Museum of Art.”

But in a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh, an official with Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art said the 2003 exhibition listed by Kim “never took place,” adding that the “name ‘Samsung Museum of Art’ was never used externally before Leeum opened [in 2004].”

Explaining about the Samsung Museum of Art special exhibition, Kim said she had “exhibited work at the gallery inside the Samsung Plaza building in Bundang [now the Bundang branch of the department store AK Plaza].”

By Bae Ji-hyun, Jung Hwan-bong and Roh Hyung-suk; staff reporters

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