National Folk Museum of Korea Children's Museum

The child has to move the story forward

In the current My Friend, Dokkaebi exhibition, the first event happens because a child presses a hazelnut button. A young dokkaebi drops its club into a stream, and the visit becomes a search for it. From that point, the exhibition treats folklore as a sequence of actions rather than something to read from a panel

Children cross a buckwheat field, meet Tneuni—a giant broom-shaped dokkaebi based on folktales about challenging passers-by to ssireum—at a dedicated wrestling participation station, follow suspicious footprints through a market, make and wear a dokkaebi cap, solve a riddle at the village entrance and finally help build a bridge using a tangram-like traditional puzzle. The museum turns oral tradition into a playable rule system

The dokkaebi were researched before they were redesigned

That play is grounded in unusually serious source work. The exhibition team drew on 2,131 dokkaebi stories in the Encyclopedia of Korean Oral Literature, selected ten representative types and then tested contemporary assumptions with visitors

A survey of 1,200 museum visitors found that roughly half imagined the horned, tiger-skin, spiked-club figure associated with the Japanese oni image. The museum then worked directly with 201 children aged six to nine, asking them to draw and describe the dokkaebi they wanted to meet. Six new characters emerged from that combination of oral literature and children’s responses

That process explains why the gallery feels less like a fantasy franchise than a reinterpretation of folklore. The characters are new, but the museum shows where their traits come from

The second gallery makes the child change the environment

Starry Starry Night uses the same participatory logic for a very different subject. Its games give children four concrete night problems to solve: a nightingale singing at the wrong time, a hatchling sea turtle losing its direction, a moth wandering around artificial light and a raccoon unable to hunt. The interaction asks children to reduce or switch off the artificial light; as the light condition changes, the dark night and stars return

The exhibition links a contemporary environmental problem—light pollution—to older ways people used stars to read time and direction. Folk culture therefore expands beyond old stories or objects. It also includes habits of living with darkness, seasons and the natural environment

The contrast between the two current galleries is useful. One begins with dokkaebi stories collected across generations; the other starts from a modern urban problem. Both ask the child to intervene before the lesson resolves

Eighty minutes makes the museum feel like a session, not a corridor

The Children’s Museum runs five 80-minute sessions a day. One reservation covers both permanent exhibitions, so families choose how to divide the time rather than queue separately for each gallery

The reservation system is strict: booking opens daily at 09:00 for dates within the next two weeks, entry more than 30 minutes after a session starts is cancelled, and repeated uncancelled no-shows can lead to a 60-day booking restriction. That structure keeps the galleries from becoming an open-ended extension of the main Folk Museum

Before you go

Admission is free, but online reservation is required and re-entry is not allowed. Children must enter with a guardian, and adults without children are generally not admitted through the normal family reservation route. Anguk Station is about a 15-minute walk; there is no museum parking, so nearby paid parking or public transport is more practical