| Lee Seung-yeon | |
|---|---|
| Hangul | 이승연 |
| Hanja | 李丞涓 |
| Revised Romanization | I Seung-yeon |
| McCune–Reischauer | Yi Sŭng-yŏn |
Lee Seung-yeon (born August 18, 1968 in Seoul, South Korea) is a South Korean actress. Lee's career as an actress was especially noted in the film 3-Iron.
Lee took third place in the 1992 Miss Korea beauty pageant.
On February 12, 2004 Lee, and companies Lototo Inc. and Netian Entertainment held a press conference to announce their plan to sell erotic photographs and videos of Lee posing as a comfort woman over the Internet, starting in March. Comfort women is the Japanese term for Korean women who forcefully served as their armies' sex slaves during World War II. The first part of the project was already done on Palau Island in the Pacific, where real comfort women were taken, with the next phases planned in Nepal and Japan. They declared they did this as a way to return the issue to the spotlight and announced part of the profits would go to surviving comfort women. A few photographs were released, showing a semi-nude Lee bathing in the sea, sleeping on the floor, and wearing somewhat revealing white clothes with dirt in her face.
This caused a great outcry from the surviving comfort women and the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. A press conference to announce the project's cancellation was held on February 16. Following the cancellation, Lee personally apologized in the "House of Sharing", a residence for some of the survivors, on her knees and with a teary face. The women rejected her apology until the materials were destroyed, something the producer was hesitant to do. The producer further proposed a preview screening to obtain public approval to the project–they had 1 hour and a half of video and about 1,500-2,000 photos taken from the film. Finally, he shaved his head (in a traditional gesture of apology) and burned publicly the materials in front of some of the surviving comfort women.