RM is trying something new. After spending years building up his personal art collection, the BTS star is now putting those works on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in an exhibit called “RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me,” which he formally introduced by making a speech on Tuesday (Sept. 29).
As live-streamed by local news outlet KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco, the 32-year-old K-pop star opened his speech by admitting how nervous he was to be standing there in front of the crowd gathered to celebrate his exhibit. “Whew! It’s been a while that I made a speech,” he said. “I think I revised the speech about 10 times, but somehow the more I worked on it, the more confused I became.”
RM went on to explain that he first started going to museums and observing art about eight years ago, steadily building up his own archive of pieces. Then, about two years ago — when he was still carrying out his obligatory military service in South Korea — he said he “got a serious proposal from SF MOMA, and I loved it.”
“Of course, since I was in the military at that time, maybe I would’ve been happy with any kind of proposal coming from San Francisco,” the star joked. “But I also thought it could be a good experience before I someday open a space I dream of, and I also thought, at a place with this kind of scale and stature, maybe I could borrow someone else’s spaces and try something fun.”
“I still feel like I’m always drifting and floating somewhere,” RM continued. “Whether I’m in the U.S. or even when I’m in Seoul, where I was born and raised … it’s not a very pleasant feeling. I think I’ve leaned on art a lot because of that feeling.”
With tickets now available to purchase for viewings starting Oct. 5 and running through Feb. 7, RM’s exhibit features “a lot of Korean modern contemporary artists,” he said during the speech. “Over the past century, Korea went through colonization, war and incredibly fast development,” the performer noted. “A lot disappeared during that time, but at the same time, some remarkable and shiny things were created.”
The biggest challenge he encountered in putting the exhibit together, according to RM, was writing descriptions of his pieces that could be displayed on labels. “I wasn’t trained in making a single label fit into 100 words — that was the hardest part,” he quipped.
“There aren’t many things that show a person more honestly than a collection they’ve built over a long period of time, spending their money, their life, their effort,” RM added. “This exhibition is a pretty long introduction of myself, and I feel embarrassed, kind of. I don’t really know why I collected all these things, so I just named one of the sections, ‘I Don’t Know, But I Like It.’”
The star also expressed that he felt a little insecure about not having a background or education in visual art, but that he realized that “sometimes an outsider can bring in a new breeze.”
“I liked collecting things ever since I was young, and at the same time, I do feel guilty about it,” he said. “Like, do I really need to carry so many unnecessary things that I don’t even need? Have I ended up becoming just a boring rich snore? Well, maybe. But I thought it would be nice if other people could see those as well, and that’s why I wanted to show the people my collection.”
RM’s introduction of the exhibit comes just a few days before he’ll rejoin his BTS bandmates on the ARIRANG World Tour, which picks back up on Friday (Oct. 2) in Colombia. The group’s album ARIRANG spent three weeks atop the Billboard 200 and spawned a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, “SWIM.”
Watch RM’s full speech commemorating the opening of his SF MOMA exhibit above, and check out the museum’s sneak peek below:
