London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

2010 Travel Diary #38: Return to Seoul

The final installments of LKL’s trip to Korea at the beginning of May Saturday 8 May 2010. We are back in Seoul in good time. At the start of the week, I hadn’t known what my Sancheong schedule was going to look like: my friend Kyung-sook had managed to secure an extra day or so … [Read More]

Another Park Soo-keun under the hammer

It seems to be a quite frequent event nowadays: a work by one of Korea’s most popular and most expensive modern artists comes up for sale in a US saleroom. And so it is that another Park Soo-keun comes under the hammer at Christie’s New York tomorrow, with an estimated price tag of up to … [Read More]

A Park Soo-keun comes up for sale

“80% of Korean art buyers are pure speculators”, says Juhl Joohyun Lee, director of Arario Gallery. And with Lee Kun-hee having stepped down from the chairmanship of Samsung and allegations flying that an illegal slush fund was used to buy works for his wife’s Leeum museum, Samsung has stopped buying art. So says the FT … [Read More]

New record price for Korean painting

Every few months there’s another news item in the Korean press about a new domestic record price paid at auction for a Korean painting. And each time, the artist is Park Soo-keun (Bak Su-geun, 박수근) (1914-1965). The most recent record was set this month (22 May), at W4.52bn: The previous record was for Park Soo-keun’s … [Read More]