The BTS leader has been championing canonical artists from his native South Korea — studying their work, buying it and sometimes talking to it. “I feel like they’re watching me,” he said.
RM, the leader of the South Korean pop group BTS, at his recording studio in Seoul with an art collection including works by Park Soo Keun, Ugo Rondinone, Yun Hyong-keun, and Chang Ucchin.Credit...Dasom Han for The New York Times
SEOUL — 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’s 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’s 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. The 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 in an interview at her gallery, PKM, in Seoul.
A BTS concert at Citi Field, in Queens, New York, in 2018.Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times
RM has also been embracing the role of art supporter, loaning a terra cotta sculpture of a horse by the 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,” the MMCA’s director, Youn Bummo, said in an email.
