RM, Boy Band Superstar, Embraces New Role: Art Patron

RM, the leader of the South Korean pop group BTS, first visited Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to perform for Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show.” It was early 2020, before the coronavirus lockdown, and in middle of the night, joined by a sizable dance crew, BTS’ seven members put on a raucous display for their single “ON” in the otherwise empty hall.

Late last year, RM returned as a civilian. “It felt really strange to be in Grand Central for the second time with so many people,” he told me one recent afternoon, sitting in the Seoul headquarters of Hybe, the entertainment firm behind the boy band. This time, he said, “I went with my friends, and I’m just a visitor buying tickets.” They jumped aboard a Metro-North train headed to Dia Beacon, the Minimalist art Xanadu in the Hudson Valley. “It’s a utopia,” he said. A room there is devoted to his favorite artist, On Kawara, who spent his career making austere darkly colored paintings that bear the date of their creation in white text.

Dia was the latest stop in a far-ranging art journey that RM, 27, has been on over the past few years as he has been building an art collection and thinking about opening an art space.

BTS’ fervent fans (who call themselves Army) have used his social media posts and press reports to follow after him, boosting attendance at the places that he hits.

Veteran dealer Park Kyung-mee credits the singer and rapper with making art more accessible to the general public. “He is throwing away the kind of barrier between the art institutions — galleries and museums — and younger people,” she said at her gallery, PKM, in Seoul.

RM has also been embracing the role of art supporter, loaning a terra cotta sculpture of a horse by Korean artist Kwon Jin-kyu to a Seoul Museum of Art retrospective that ran until May, and in 2020 donating 100 million won (about $84,000 at the time) to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) so that it could reissue out-of-print art books and distribute them to libraries. Arts Council Korea, a government-affiliated body, subsequently named him an Art Sponsor of the Year. “We are very happy that RM, who has a high global influence, is an art lover,” MMCA’s director, Youn Bummo, said in an email.

That global influence has almost unfathomable reach. BTS’ YouTube channel has more than 70 million subscribers (another K-pop act, Blackpink, is the only artist with more), and RM’s Instagram alone has 37 million followers. (MMCA’s has 200,000.) A 35-minute vlog that he recorded about his visit to the Art Basel fair in Switzerland this past summer has racked up almost 6 million views. For the insular, impenetrable world, he may be a dream ambassador.

Which makes it remarkable that his passion for visual art came about through “serendipity, more of an accidental encounter,” said RM, whose given name is Kim Namjun. (He adopted the stage name formally in 2017 to replace the moniker Rap Monster.) He grew up near Seoul, and his parents “did take me to museums, but I don’t think I enjoyed it that much,” he said.

Sitting in his hotel room while on tour in 2018, deciding what to do during some downtime, RM opted to venture to the Art Institute of Chicago. Paintings by Seurat and Monet captivated him. “It was almost like Stendhal syndrome,” he said, referring to the condition whereby art induces physical symptoms in a viewer, like lightheadedness or a quickened heart rate. It was a shock to see works that he knew from reproductions in person. “It was like: wow. I was looking at these art pieces, and it was an amazing experience.”

Anytime the subject turned to art, the already energetic musician got especially excited; he was with an interpreter, but he usually switched to English (he is very fluent, and has said that he learned watching “Friends”).

This article originally appeared in The New York Times