The National Museum of Korea never sleeps, and neither do the people who guard it

What if the magical — if slightly spooky — world of the 2006 hit film “Night at the Museum” was not just a fiction? At the National Museum of Korea, that may just be the case. Well, at least for Kwon Nam-soo, a security guard who has been with the museum for nearly a decade. 

“I open the door to an exhibition hall during my night shifts, and it's a little eerie,” said Kwon to the Korea JoongAng Daily. He says six guards work the night in pairs until dawn.

“The older guards used to tell me: ‘We dug all of this out of tombs; we’re all in here together with the spirits.’ So you start to think about it — these are the things our ancestors used, and here I am with them. Maybe I'm with their souls.”

Nothing actually stirs the way the film promises — no gold-crowned Silla king rising from his case, no 10-story stone pagoda stretching after a long night, no Pensive Bodhisattva stepping down off its plinth.

But the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan, now the world’s third biggest museum by attendance, never really closes. The visitors file out around evening and the lights come down in the galleries, yet the building runs on through the night under a duty officer who keeps watch until morning. Almost everything in the cases came out of the ground — grave goods, burial bronzes, the belongings of the long dead — and on a night round, alone in an unlit hall with the periodic beep of a sensor sounding in the distance, it is not difficult to feel that you have company.

Kwon came to the job the way most of his colleagues did — as a former career soldier. The security field tends to draw ex-military men, former athletes and people certified in close protection or with backgrounds in martial arts. He joined in 2013 at the National Museum in Cheongju and moved to Seoul in 2017.

As the deputy head of the operations office, Kwon knows the National Museum of Korea building the way few visitors ever will, and so to get the full story of his experiences and wisdom from the field, this reporter followed the guard around for a day, pestering him with questions.

Before the doors open

A guard’s day begins around 9 a.m. — or, on the days a night shift falls to him, the evening before — with a change into uniform a half hour prior to when the public is let in at 9:30 a.m. By then a line has usually already formed outside. The National Museum of Korea has become an open-run destination, due in part to Netflix's animated megahit "KPop Demon Hunters" (2025), which sent fans searching for the Korean folklore and treasures the film brought to life.

Nonetheless, the ritual of morning inspection must go on.  The guards unlock the iron doors of the halls one at a time; then, in pairs, they walk the galleries — not strolling but checking. It is rare, but glass cases crack overnight. A label works loose and falls to the ground. A piece tips from its holding place. A case is found standing open.

The senior guards press the habit of checking for any of these disturbances on every new hire, who all begin sure that nothing ever happens and are corrected soon enough. There is an old way of saying good morning in Korean — bamsae annyeong, roughly, asking whether you made it through the night.

“You are checking that nothing happened overnight,” Kwon said during his morning check on the day of Korea JoongAng Daily’s visit. “The power for lights in the exhibition rooms has been off and comes back on, so some of the screens don't wake up — you go over the displays, the artifacts, the lighting, and then you open the doors.”

Every morning, the guards ask the artifacts bamsae annyeong.

Picture a guard and what comes to mind is the figure in a gallery they are charged to watch over; but that duty is only an addition to the care of four behind-the-scenes facilities overseen by the national museum's guard.

Behind the exhibition halls is a control room, where the feeds from some 500 cameras stream in, the whole museum cycling across a wall of monitors. Then there is the information desk in the administrative building, which decides who comes and goes. Next there is the storage, where the treasures live when they are off display, a sealed zone with its own watch. And behind everything, recently built, is the conservation science center, where objects are treated before anyone is permitted to look at them.

Inside that control room, a guard sat almost unmoving before the bank of monitors, his face washed pale by the screens, his eyes sliding from one feed to the next as visitors crossed them in silent miniature.

When the doors open

Then the doors open, and for the rest of the day the museum belongs to everyone who walks into it. The guards move to patrol, circling their floors, and the work turns out to be less about the art than about people, with visitors asking where is the bathroom, where is the nursing room, why is that man lying down, why are those children running. By late morning the stone floors carried a steady din — the rattle of strollers, the overlapping chatter of tour groups, the squeak of sneakers as a child broke into a run a half-step ahead of a reaching parent.

The security itself is so thoroughly built — sensors live, cases sealed — that the groundwork done by the guards has tipped almost entirely into service towards the visitors. The most common offense at museums is actually not theft but eating; people are checked at the door, though not the way an airport checks you, and gum, caramels and candy come through anyway.

The art of stopping them is to smile and apologize before you ask, according to Kwon, because the ungoverned version of that conversation becomes a fight, and most people put the food away once told. At one display case a guard drifted toward a pair of small girls peeling open a snack, leaned in slightly at the waist, and murmured a few words; the wrapper disappeared back into a bag without complaint.

“Some of them even brew coffee in here,” Kwon added. “That one gets to me.”

Touching is the quieter but more serious trouble. Much of what sits out in the open is reproduction, but a reproduction is not nothing — a convincing fake handbag isn't cheap, and you still cannot have hands all over it. At a recent painting exhibition, people kept reaching for the surface of an oil work; the paint comes off on fingers. Adults mostly resist, but children do not.

And the cases are wired for sound and vibration, so a tap no one would think twice about arrives in the control room as an alarm — when a school group passes through, the alerts come in a steady patter, and a guard walks over to repeat what amounts to the museum's one real rule.

“Look only with your eyes, we tell visitors,” Kwon said.

The school groups are, by agreement, the hardest part of the job, according to Kwon, and an institution like this almost always is packed with children and students on field trips. At some point, teachers lose the children and step back to rest, and the children do what children do when not supervised. Kwon has had kids spit from an upper floor; once, a slipper came down from a height.

Foreign visitors, on the other hand, introduce the language problem. A guard who once insisted on Korean with a group of Chinese tourists — if you’re in Korea, speak Korean — drew a serious complaint; the fix, now in the training, is to keep some English phrases on hand and to pass the hard cases to the front information desk.

All of these problems have compounded over the past year, as the National Museum of Korea has seen a surge in visitors. More than 6 million people came last year — an average of 16,500 daily — a figure Kwon likes to compare to the Louvre’s numbers. But the exhibition space was not made for it — the safe number is somewhere near 15,000 a day.

“Last year was the first time in nearly 10 years I'd seen anything like it,” Kwon said. “There is no reservation system, so we just let everyone in. It looked like Myeongdong. Honestly, we were lucky nobody got hurt.”

No new hires are coming, so this year there are student volunteers and crowd-crush drills run from a manual, written after a season that taught the operation office that people collapse more often than you would guess, mostly from the summer heat.

The museum within reach

For all the bedlam, one room genuinely keeps Kwon up. The Room of Quiet Contemplation is the National Museum of Korea’s answer to having no Mona Lisa: two gilt-bronze Pensive Bodhisattvas, National Treasures No. 78 and No. 83, out in the open, no glass, near enough to touch. The room is kept dim and hushed, the two figures lit so softly that they seem to hover above the floor. Visitors drop their voices the moment they step inside.

Kwon is glad that the room is there and uneasy about it in the same breath. A guard sits inside the room always. A visitor once climbed toward the figures before anyone could move; the sensors caught it, but you cannot mark everybody one-to-one.

“With the Mona Lisa there is a barrier — you look from a distance,” Kwon said. “Here you are right up close, within reach. If someone with real intentions to harm the figures tries something, there’s nothing you can do.”

That is the tradeoff of letting people stand so close to something so precious.

On duty at the Room of Quiet Contemplation, Kwon carefully watched every single person moving too close to the bodhisattvas, twitching slightly whenever a small child reached over the railings as if to grab on to the statues.

“I feel very attached to these bodhisattvas sometimes, and sometimes I feel nothing at all,” Kwon said. “That second part comes naturally from being here so long, for days on end, standing guard over the most coveted treasures.”

Another source of worry for the guards is something entirely different: fire. The nearby National Hangeul Museum burned during construction work not long ago. At the National Museum of Korea, the galleries are forever being torn down and rebuilt for new shows, and the guards inspect after every job. The fire system is very sensitive — steam from a food stall will set it off — and the museum has never had a fire.

Still, when an alarm sounds every door in the building unlocks, and so, beneath the peace, there is always a little tension about the emergency that has not yet occurred.

What keeps the work from souring is partly the people, and partly the wonder — which dulls with familiarity, and comes back without warning. Kwon’s favorite visitor was a Korean American man who had come back to Seoul after years away. He had brought foreign friends and got so worked up about being able to show them all the museum had to offer — for free — that he took hold of Kwon's hands and told him so.

“Here is a place this fine, standing open to anyone!” the Korean American visitor had exclaimed to Kwon.

The daily rewards for the guards are smaller — a visitor who does as he or she is asked without arguing, a cold bottle of water pressed on a guard working a line in the heat. And then there is the thing Kwon keeps for himself.

“The awe wears off when you see the same things every day, for sure,” Kwon said. “But during the Yi Sun-sin show, those were precious pieces — I carried them up from Hyeonchungsa Shrine myself. Seeing what [the general] actually used, with my own eyes, it hit me all at once. I get to see what other people can't, up close, and first.”

When asked what he wishes people understood about the work of the guards, Kwon found a metaphor.

“We are a kind of glue, a glue holding the museum together,” Kwon said. “Because we are here, visitors get to look around in peace. Without us it would be a marketplace, not a museum. We’re the thing that lets you walk through and forget that we’re there.” 

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]