Here is the 2020 Bank of Korea Official Mint Set! The coins in this set are mint strikes, and not "proof" coins as seen in the earlier 2020 60th Anniversary set. Looks like 120,000 sets will be sold, with 40,000 sold at a time on Nov. 3, Nov. 24, and Dec. 10th. They will be sold online at the KOMSCO (South Korean Mint) sales website. Cost: 7,400 won (3,000 won for shipping within Korea) and 5 sets max per-person. And again, nobody outside of Korea can buy this anyway. Only for people with contacts in Korea or those willing to pay a reseller on another platform, like eBay.
I hear that South Korea will redesign the 100 won coin and it's paper money because of some portrait issues, I thought 2020 was the the end of the line, did they change their minds? Will there be coins beyond 2021?
The "2020 Coinless Plan" is still official policy --even though by November 2020 it's still not in place(!) due to merchant compliance issues. I guess people still want their coins... The issue with the 100-Won is because, according to Korean Media, the portrait artist who painted the 1953 official state portrait of Admiral Yi Sun-shin was listed in the 친일인명사전 (Pro-Japanese Dictionary) in 2009 for submitting art at two art exhibitions in the 1940s. Of course, Japan was in charge at the time. The bust seen on the 100-Won was copied from the artist, Jang Woo-seong's painting. Now that the Ministry of Culture is staffed by the people brought in by current left-wing president, Moon Jae-in, they are going to "de-list" the artist Jang Woo-seong's icon-painting (called a "yeong-jeong") of Admiral Yi. This painting (the Admiral's "yeong-jeong") is actually considered the "personage" of the individual painted, so it's sort of an icon, I guess, not just a painting. The artist, Jang, is accused of exhibiting art during the era of "Japanese Korea (1905-ish to 1945)," a time when exhibiting at major exhibitions was the ONLY way for a painter to develop his/her career. I guess President Moon's people of 2020 expect him to have known better than to have done that back in 1943(?). That is literally the reason why his painting is getting canceled and now the 100-Won coin is getting reworked. Oh. Not just the 100-Won. Also the 50,000-Won, 10,000-Won, and 5,000-Won banknotes. For the same reasons: The portrait artists whose images were used to place famous Koreans on these notes had also developed their careers when Japan ran Korea. In other words, they are guilty of being born at the wrong time, basically.
If you have some South Korean currency, i.e. not real money(!), I'll take it off of your hands for free. Because it's not real money, right?
