Last weekend, we decided to visit the Trick Eye Museum in Hongdae. It was a little hard to find, but if you scroll to the bottom, we’ve added a map just in case you want to visit! It is in the basement of the Homi-hwabang building and you will see the sign outside. The museum is a pretty silly tourist attraction that has three dimensional paintings that you can pose in. The two and three dimensional art displays are designed to fool your eye. The trick really comes alive in the photographs as all the lighting is arranged specifically for taking pictures.

Trick Eye Museum // KOREA

Oh weird and wonderful Korea, you never cease to put a smile on our faces. This weekend we learned that Korea has many museums that are quite unusual. We have recently noticed that Korea has a bit of a fascination with poop. Our students are constantly drawing swirly pictures of it, we see it featured and socks in cartoon form, and Suwon has a museum devoted to the toilet, called Mr. Toilet’s House.

It is dedicated to the mayor of Suwon who was born in an outhouse and adopted the lovely nickname, Mr. Toilet. As you can imagine, the museum shows the history of the potty and has many… interesting sculptures of toilets and people using them.

Click here to visit Chris’s review of the Toilet Museum and to see more photos!

But anyway, back to the Trick Eye Museum. We really regretted leaving the apartment without our DSLR as we had to make do taking pictures with our phones instead. Apart from the throngs of visitors jockeying for their turn at each “photo op,” it was pretty funny deciding how to pose with each unique scenario. We enjoyed watching other people making ridiculous poses that wouldn’t seem remotely sane until you saw the photo. We also made fools of ourselves to get some of these photos, but it was a lot of fun.

The admission was 15,000KRW per person, but this included a refrigerated “Ice Museum” with carved ice rooms, cars, statues, and a slide. Yes, an ice slide. After the Ice Museum and Trick Eye museum there is a short mirror maze to disorient visitors one more time. In the lobby there are a few more activities if you have energy left. You can paint little white porcelain caricature dolls, pose in Ancient Greek attire in front of landscape paintings, have your photo turned into a wall-sized painting, get coffee at a cafe, and there is even a candy shop to satisfy your sweet tooth.

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As promised, here is the map for getting to the Trick Eye Museum!

Trick Eye Museum