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• S Korean hero assassin’s calligraphy up for auction

  • AFP, SEOUL
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  Calligraphy by a South Korean independence hero, created while awaiting execution for assassinating a Japanese statesman, is breaking new auction records in Seoul, as the country’s ultra-rich seek to bring historic artwork home.

  Revered in the South for his efforts to defend the country against Japanese encroachment, Ahn Jung-geun is best known for his dramatic, high-stakes assassination of Japanese prime minister Ito Hirobumi in 1909 at a railway station in Harbin, China.

  He was hanged by Japanese authorities in 1910, just months before Tokyo formally annexed the Korean peninsula, ushering in a brutal period of occupation that lasted until the end of World War II.

  

  A woman looks at a calligraphy created by South Korean independence activist Ahn Jung-geun in his jail cell in the weeks leading up to his execution in 1910, at the Seoul Auction in Seoul on April 22.

  Photo: Jung Yeon-je, AFP

  More than a century after his death, the calligraphy he created in his prison cell during his final days — typically at the request of Japanese officials — is drawing fresh attention in Seoul’s glitzy art scene.

  Ahn was held in his prison cell in China for about 40 days leading up to his execution and he kept himself busy writing an autobiography and making hundreds of calligraphy pieces, including one requested by his own prison guard.

  “The court and prison officials, saying they wanted to keep my calligraphy as a memento, brought me hundreds of sheets of silk and paper and asked me to create for them,” Ahn wrote. “I ended up spending several hours each day doing calligraphy, even though I wasn’t particularly skilled in it.”

  The Japanese who took his calligraphy preserved them with care, and some of their descendants have donated them to the South Korean government, which subsequently designated them as national treasures. Now, more of the calligraphies are surfacing in the private art market, with the latest being auctioned last month in Seoul for 940 million won (US$673,792) — more than three times its opening bid.

  The piece, which says “green bamboo” — a traditional symbol of integrity — had been owned by a Japanese who did not wish to be identified, and they had done an impeccable job preserving it, Seoul Auction art valuation specialist Kim Jun-seon said.

  “It was not even mounted and was still rolled up, but when we opened the case, the scent of ink still lingered in the air,” she said.

  Japan has said Ahn was a criminal and a terrorist, and refused to hand over his remains. They have never been located.

  Moves to honor Ahn by Seoul and Beijing have previously strained ties with Tokyo, even briefly sparking a diplomatic row in 2013.

  The fact that his Japanese captors preserved his calligraphy “reflects the cultural and political contradictions of early 20th-century East Asia,” University of Nevada, Reno history professor Eugene Park said.

  At his trial, Ahn identified himself as a soldier for Korea, defined his assassination of Ito as a military operation and envisioned a united East Asia — comprising Korea, China and Japan — somewhat akin to today’s EU.

  “Some Japanese may have seen him as a misguided, but principled idealist,” Park said.

  His calligraphy, which focused on values such as peace and ethics, “resonated culturally, even if he opposed them politically,” he said.

  “At a time when Japan’s own imperial identity was unsettled, preserving his works revealed deeper tensions between respect for moral courage and the pursuit of colonial domination,” Park said.
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