Kim Hong-nam

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Kim Hong-nam

Hangul	김홍남
Hanja	金紅男
Revised Romanization	Gim Hong-nam
McCune-Reischauer	Kim Hong-nam

Kim Hong-nam (1948-01-23) is the South Korean director of the National Museum of Korea, art historian, and professor of Ewha Woman's University.

She was appointed to the position in 2006, making her the first woman to hold the post^[1] ^[2] as well as the first Director not to have come up through the ranks. In October 2007 she was accused of having previously improperly given away a national cultural property. The accusation is based on a museum label in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, which indicates Ms. Kim gave a Bronze Age earthenware pot to the institution in 1998 to commemorate the opening of the Arts of Korea Gallery. At the time, it was illegal to give or sell Korean cultural assets outside of the Republic of Korea without getting approval from the Culture Ministry of the country. ^[3]

[edit] Biography

Kim Hong-nam was born in Jinju, South Korea on 23 January 1948^[4]. While she was still young, her family moved to Busan. Later she was schooled in Seoul, at the Ewha Girls' High School. She studied at Seoul National University (B.A. in Aesthetics) before becoming the first Korean to get a PhD in art history, from Yale University. Ms. Kim's focus was on Chinese painting, her dissertation being The History of Chinese Painting in the 17th Century. In 1980, she was Research Fellow in Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution. After holding the same position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City the following year, she joined the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she served as an assistant professor from 1982 through 1988. In 1991, she was appointed professor of Art History at South Korea's prestigious Ewha Women's University. In 1995 she began a five-year tenure as Director of the Ewha Women's University Museum.^[5] In 2003 she was selected as Director of the National Folk Museum of Korea, a position she held until be selected in August 2006 to head the nation's premiere museum. One of her foci is to increase the number of foreign visitors, which dropped radically with the museum's move to its new facilities.