The purpose of this study was to identify the color characteristics of Korean culture, the color consciousness of Korean people based on their arche-pattern sentiment, and to analyze the colors of the costumes of Korean folk festivals, which clearly suggest the archetype of Korean tradition. The range of this study is focused on Korea's important intangible cultural assets in which the colors used in folk festivals were fully expressed, and 20 folk games and plays were selected from among different festival events. Hundred and fifteen pictures from these 20 folk games/plays were used to extract the costume colors and conduct color analyses. Among 647 colors extracted in total, this article used 199 colors after excluding overlapping colors. The results show that Korean folk festivals have served as the medium of non-differentiation that goes beyond the differentiated order of reality. Costumes for these Korean folk festivals, such as folk games and folk plays, have a sacred meaning as ritualistic robes. Five element colors in these costumes for the Korean folk festival are used as a means of circulatory thinking and as a symbol of Chaos the very origin of undifferentiated thinking beyond one's daily lives. It was found that these highly chromatic five element colors have always been used, wherever this undifferentiated thinking was strongly expressed. Delivering visually strong impacts, these five element colors symbolize the concept of the Arche-pattern theory, being related to infinite freedom without any restrictions. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 35, 443-453, 2010; Published online 1 June 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20576