A tall work of calligraphy from the 19th century usually hangs in RM’s recording studio in Seoul.
“One’s actions and conduct should be as upright and weighty as a thousand massive rocks,” its characters read. They’re the words of the Chinese philosopher Shao Yong, from 1,000 years ago, written in sturdy strokes by the Korean scholar Kim Jeong-hui.
“One’s refinement and cultivation,” it continues, “should be like gold that has been tempered a hundred times.”
“People told me: Isn’t it too heavy for a studio?” RM, the leader of the K-pop group BTS, said in a video interview from South Korea in April. “But I always get inspired by people in the past, because it was really so hard to even just survive and just live a life at that time.”
On Oct. 3, that potent ink work will go on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in an ambitious exhibition that pairs 45 works from its holdings with 145 from RM’s own art collection. Most of RM’s pieces are by Korean artists, including many who lived through difficult times: Japan’s colonization of the country in the first half of the 1900s, then the Korean War and decades of dictatorship.
RM began collecting after a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, while on tour with BTS, he said. He was thrilled to see artists he knew from textbooks, and he had a startling realization. “It’s a shame on me,” he said. “I’m an artist from Korea, and I know Picasso, I know van Gogh. I don’t know anyone from my country.” He told himself, “You have to find your root,” he said, “and that’s how I started to look at the Korean artists.”
“They just make me not get too lazy, not get too settled down,” RM added.
Over the previous couple of weeks, the 31-year-old had played concerts with BTS in Tokyo and Goyang, the Seoul satellite city where RM grew up. The next day, he would fly to Tampa, Fla., continuing a tour with more than 80 dates on five continents over 12 months.
In mid-July, the band played the World Cup’s first halftime show, to nearly two billion global viewers, at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., and their two-night stand there in August drew 157,000 people, including RM’s childhood hero, the rapper Nas.
Days earlier, the band had made news by saying it would not compete in the 2027 Grammy Awards, protesting the creation of an Asian pop performance category. “We hope music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided into region or language,” they said in a statement.
The Museums Special Section
BTS’s seven members reunited last year, after completing mandatory military service, and released their 10th studio album, “Arirang,” in March. Named after a beloved Korean folk song, it is a heady mélange of pop, hip-hop and EDM that delves into matters of identity and fame.
Amid all of this, RM, a name he picked to replace Rap Monster (he was born Kim Nam-joon), has been working on the museum exhibition, in which “two different worlds are coming together,” he said. “East or West, Modernism and K-pop, or Korea and America.”
The venture has no obvious parallel. The musician couple Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz showed some 100 pieces from their collection of Black art at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024, and the rapper Drake and the basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal have curated modest affairs. But the exhibition “RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me,” which is set to run through Feb. 7, 2027, will occupy almost an entire floor of the museum and feature canonical international artists alongside Korean figures who are rarely seen stateside, along with centuries-old ceramics, calligraphy and more.
“I just hope for it to be really personal,” RM said, “because I think the best part about art is the expansion from something personal to something universal.”
SFMOMA sent RM a proposal that “was really serious,” he said, “and really they understood me — what I love and what I’ve been pursuing.” He has been thinking about opening his own exhibition space in Seoul, but he doesn’t want to rush that.
He replied with a handwritten letter that the show’s other two curators, América Castillo and Hyoeun Kim, said was moving to read because of his sincerity about wanting to introduce people to Korean art. “He has a poeticness to writing that’s very beautiful,” Castillo said.
“As a Korean curator,” said Kim, an SFMOMA assistant curator, “this project carries actually a special weight for me, because I really want to introduce great Korean art and Korean artists in the U.S.”
SFMOMA’s director, Christopher Bedford, has an answer for anyone who might question whether a celebrity should be curating his own collection at a major museum. “He is a seismic force,” Bedford said in May, “incredibly curious and intelligent, has ideas about collecting and audience engagement that go far beyond what museums do conventionally, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to give him a curatorial voice at all.”
The day before we spoke, Bedford had visited SFMOMA’s current Henri Matisse-themed show with RM. “It is a treat to see how closely, passionately and unguardedly he looks at art,” he said, “and how actually literate he is in art history.”
To learn about the pioneering Korean artists he favors, RM has met some of their families and haunted museums. “I’m born as an otaku for some things,” he said, using the Japanese word for a cultural obsessive. “When I get to love something I seriously love, I really get into it.”
Specializing in those artists had its benefits. “Honestly, they were more affordable,” RM said. He laughed. “For real. I’m not a huge, like, hedge-fund investor.”
“Since there are almost no young people like me who collect the old Korean modernists, when it comes to an auction, I always fight with 70-, 80-year-olds,” RM said. Some of those competitors have deeper pockets than him, he said, and so he sometimes asks them, “Please, leave it for me. Leave it for the young generation, please. You have your great works.”
Chang Ucchin (1917-90), who painted disarming scenes of traditional life in Korea with a childlike sophistication, is one of the show’s prominent figures. And there will be three canvases by the redoubtable abstract painter Kim Whanki (1913-74), who happens to have been the great-uncle of another Korean rap star, T.O.P. (Two are RM’s, and the third is SFMOMA’s.)
Castillo, a curatorial project manager at SFMOMA, said that, while planning, “We started finding a lot of beautiful synchronicities between his collection and our collection.”
The exhibition’s design changed over time. “I wanted to put the works on the floor and everywhere,” RM said. Let’s just say he was reminded, “It’s an institution, and we have safety rules and design standards,” he said. Some texts will appear in his handwriting, and there will be bilingual labeling, in English and Korean.
“I really wanted to include music, and I’m still thinking about it,” RM added, “but I don’t know. It’s really tricky to include music.” (He ended up making a playlist for one area.)
The exhibition will be divided into thematic sections (and a gift shop). One, titled “Bluewater,” has pieces that center on the color blue and depictions of water by artists like Yves Klein, Dan Flavin and a pioneer of geometric abstraction, Yoo Youngkuk,
Another area, “Photobuddha,” has a Nam June Paik of a bronze Buddha watching a TV with a closed-circuit video of itself.
One more, exploring the vagaries of taste, will have a drawing by Cy Twombly, the American painter whose scrawls are almost calligraphic, along with a work by the street artist Invader (owned by RM), a Pokémon animation cell (also owned by RM) and a string of lights by Felix Gonzalez-Torres — an unusual mixture of high and low. Sometimes, when you really love something, RM said, “you just don’t know, and just can’t explain it.”
RM particularly admires Yun Hyong-keun (1928-2007), who made alluring and introspective abstractions, swaths of dark, diluted paint on linen or canvas. Imprisoned on multiple occasions on political grounds and nearly executed, “he was the type of guy who never bows down,” RM said. “He also hated shortcuts.” RM’s 2022 solo album, “Indigo,” includes a track with Erykah Badu, “Yun,” that has a sample of the painter expounding on the importance of seeking truth.
More than a dozen Yuns that RM has collected will occupy one section. “When you get to know his life and his narrative, the human, and the humanity and the painting itself, they just match so perfectly,” he said. “And the black he had — I just never get tired of it.”
Another gallery will include two more Yuns with a majestic Mark Rothko (from SFMOMA) that has its own meditative fields of color, red-orange and blue. “I just wanted to really see the actual scene, just hanging together and what it maybe feels like, to me and for Americans,” RM said.
RM exudes a restless curiosity when he discusses art and his collecting, which is part of a larger mission for him. “It’s a very important time for Korea, because a lot of people, a lot of foreigners, are coming to Korea, and they’re getting to know what Korean culture is,” he told me. “They don’t ask me anymore, Are you from South or North? And I really appreciate it.”
He has donated money to conserve Korean artifacts, and in June, he was named the first global ambassador for the National Museum of Korea, whose collection dates back more than 5,000 years. He seems likely to bring new audiences to SFMOMA (an incentive for the museum to do the show). “Museums and the arts, they scare a lot of people, sometimes,” he said.
Even he has his issues. Though he’s an assiduous gallerygoer, “contemporary is always confusing and tricky for me,” he said. “Sometimes it really gives me a lot of headaches, because I have to study.” And while galleries invite him to visit their artists, “I’m scared of disappointments,” he said. “When you really love an artist, sometimes you just want to step far away and see the outside.”
Still, that desire to connect — to unite people through culture — runs through much that he does. He has said that he hopes that the SFMOMA show can be “a small but sturdy bridge for many.“
“I mean, if I have the right to be the bridge,” RM added. “I have my fans, and I have the people who really love me, and who really seriously care for my likes and tastes. I’m really blessed to make an event like this. I’m just an art lover from the outside.”
RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me
Oct. 3 to Feb. 7, 2027, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 15 Third Street; 415-357-4000, sfmoma.org.