25 000 Won Seesaw

Issued as part of Seoul's 1988 Summer Olympics commemorative program, this piece belongs to a multi-coin series the Bank of Korea produced across several years leading up to the Games. South Korea used the Olympics aggressively as a soft-power moment — the country was still under the shadow of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and a contested transition toward democratic government, and the Seoul Games were intended to signal arrival on the world stage.

The seesaw subject draws from traditional Korean folk games, a deliberate curatorial choice across the series to foreground indigenous culture rather than athletic competition alone.