Serendipity brought me to the opening weekend of BTS leader RM’s curated exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was in San Francisco for my high school reunion and luckily one of my sisters secured tickets for the preview weekend, which was sold out. It felt a bit like a concert with freebies from friendly Army fans.
The exhibit includes about 150 pieces from RM's own collection along with complimentary artwork from SFMOMA.
It was breathtaking. While I am not an art historian, I am a BTS fan. However, neither is necessary to appreciate the exhibit. I learned a bit about what his celebrity has taken away from him as an ordinary human being, and how art helps him to reclaim what is missing. The curated pieces offer a sense of serenity and an appreciation of the general, rather than particularistic aspects of the human experience. I found it to be melancholy, but contemplative.
One can listen to an audio recording of RM’s commentary, but his descriptions of the rooms also appear in his own Korean handwriting. This makes it seem as if he is personally guiding you through the exhibit.
The exhibit begins with blue pieces anchored by Kim Whan-ki, whose painting of blue dots was inspired by thoughts of Seoul while living in New York. RM writes that, “I caught myself thinking a thousand thoughts of my own.” SFMOMA acquired this piece from Kim’s wife in 1979, so it links Seoul to San Francisco, and RM to SFMOMA.
Another blue piece is Quac Insik’s “Work 84B,” from RM’s collection. Here, the blue dots fade from darker to lighter shades in an ombre pattern. RM writes, “In English, ‘blue’ can mean sadness, but it is also the color of the sky and of denim. And water flows, reflecting all of those blues.” Of course, blue has been an important color for RM’s own music, as his 2022 album was titled “Indigo.”
The next room, “Friendscape,” is about the comfort people receive from animals and, by extension, nature (Friend+landscape). RM held an anonymous art exhibit in Korea three years ago, and visitors “lingered the longest” at a painting of a cat. His fans use the expression “namjooning,” a reference to RM's real name, Kim Nam-joon, to describe the peaceful feelings one gets from simple pleasures like enjoying nature, visiting museums or reading a book, and this concept is expressed clearly.
Afterward, we arrived at “Home.” Of course, it’s not his literal home. The constant travel required of the leader of BTS means that he relies on his art to comfort him. This section relied heavily on Korean modernist Chang Ucchin, who not only painted but produced ceramics. These pieces strongly contrast what I imagine the life of a pop star to entail.
The zone called “Photo Buddha” is actually Nam June Paik’s “Enlightenment Compressed.” Here, visitors can take a selfie with a buddha and appear on a tiny television screen. This 1994 piece, first planned by Paik in 1974, offers a premonition of social media and selfies, but the Buddha remains himself.
RM shares that he loves museums because he can take a break from being the object observed and become an observer. In the section titled, “People,” there are largely pictures of anonymous people. Han Youngsoo’s photo of a couple whose heads are out of the frame shows that they can be “anyone, any couple at all,” according to RM. To me, this is a cry for anonymity.
We then moved to a room titled “Passion,” which focuses on the passion of artists. RM tells the audience that by focusing on the obstacles that other Korean artists like Rhee Seundja, Park Rehyun or Choi Wook-kyung faced, he reminds himself to not take his achievements for granted. My sisters and I noticed that he placed a strong focus on women — they struggled because of their husbands and children, but also because they were not taken seriously as artists. The exhibit quotes Choi Wook-kyung, “I came to reject the labels used to identify painters as women. A man is simply called ‘a painter,’ with no need to specify his gender.” This is a clear parallel to the obstacles faced by K-pop artists like BTS. The recent Grammy category of “Best Asian Pop” incited a similar response by BTS.
The penultimate section moves back to color and problematizes translation even for colors. In Korean and Chinese, the phrase “tea-colored” has been translated to English as the color “umber.” The color “cheong” (Korean) or “qing” (Chinese) is described as blue, but it’s an East Asian descriptor of a blue-green color. This reflects the tension of translating Korean ideas to an English-speaking audience, and it’s certainly something BTS faces when presenting their Korean lyrics to Western fans. Here, the browns and blues represent earth and blue skies.
In the middle of the exhibit, I heard “Younger Days” by Sanullim with the lyrics, “Someday it will pass, this green youth, like flower petals that wither and bloom again.” RM contemplates his own aging, and we end in a dark and quiet room.
For those of us who are BTS fans, this may be our closest proximity to RM's feelings. It is a serious and contemplative exhibit, and art clearly gives him comfort and helps him to think through the meaning of his life. He has effectively brought modern Korean artists into broader discussions of the human experience, and not simply as an afterthought or the latest ripple in the Korean Wave. He wants us to reject gender and national modifiers of words such as "art" and "artist" by emphasizing universalistic themes — yet RM has managed to teach us about Korean art and himself.
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Grace Kao
Grace Kao is an IBM professor of sociology and professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.
khnews@heraldcorp.com
