«We live in an era defined by borders. This exhibition at SFMOMA reflects precisely those boundaries: between East and West, Korea and America, modern and contemporary, personal and universal. I don’t want to establish how these works should be looked at; whether out of curiosity or study, every perspective is welcome. My only hope is that this exhibition can become, for many, a small but solid bridge.”
These words would be enough RMleader of BTS, to understand that RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me it is not simply the exhibition of the art collection of one of the most famous pop stars in the world. It is something more ambitious: the attempt to transform a private passion into a cultural dialogue between South Korea and the United States, between artists consecrated by the history of Western art and fundamental names of modern Korean art that the American public has had far fewer opportunities to encounter.
From the 3 October 2026 to 7 February 2027the seventh floor of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in fact, it will host the first museum exhibition built around the works of RM’s personal collection. The project will bring together approx 200 works from the artist’s collection and that of the SFMOMAmany of which have never before been shown in the United States, and the museum says it will represent one of the largest presentations of modern and contemporary Korean art ever staged in the country.
It’s not difficult to understand why the operation has already attracted the attention of the art world. On the one hand there are Yun Hyong-keun, Park Rehyun, Kwon Okyon, Kim Yun Shin, To Sangbong and Chang Ucchin; on the other, through the SFMOMA collection, figures such as Kim Whanki, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Klee. Not a succession of prestigious names, but a montage constructed to bring together different sensibilities, periods and geographies.
RM, from BTS to museums: a passion that began during tours
That RM has transformed art into an important part of its public identity over the years is nothing new. His attendance at museums has almost become a second parallel story to BTS’s musical one, so much so that visits, works and artists reported by him have often attracted the attention of international fans towards Korean galleries and institutions.
According to the reconstruction of the SFMOMA, its more systematic interest in exhibitions began in 2018when RM starts visiting museums during tour stops. The decisive step, however, came a year later, at Venice Biennale 2019in front of a work by Yun Hyong-keunan artist destined to become one of his absolute references.
From that meeting a collection took shape which over the years has expanded to include protagonists of Korean modernity and important international artists, apparently without following the logic of accumulation or trophy, but the much more personal one of affinities.
Yun, one of the great protagonists of Dansaekhwathe Korean painting movement often associated with monochrome, constructed its works through dark pigments, especially umber and ultramarine, transforming seemingly essential surfaces into spaces of enormous emotional density. His biography, marked by the political turbulence of twentieth-century Korea, and the radical nature of his language deeply impressed RM.
It is no coincidence that Yun occupies a central role in the San Francisco project.
From Yun Hyong-keun to Rothko: Korea dialogues with the world
One of the most interesting aspects of Between You and Me it is in fact the attempt to avoid the construction of two separate universes, one Korean and one Western. The works are instead related by analogies, tensions and sensitivity.
It is the principle that runs through the entire project and that allows us to read an artist like Yun Hyong-keun alongside figures from international art history. Yun was also admired by him Donald Juddwho in the 1990s invited him to exhibit in New York and Marfa, Texas: in the SFMOMA exhibition the works of the two artists will symbolically meet again.
The works announced include Untitled of 1973 by Yun, The River Scene Of Chang Ucchin, Work from 1982 by Yoo Youngkuk, Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2015-9 Of Kim Yun Shina photograph of Han Youngsoo of Seoul between the 1950s and 1960s and Flowers Of Giorgio Morandiall belonging to the RM collection.
These will be accompanied by works by SFMOMA such as No. 14, 1960 Of Mark Rothko, 26-I-70 #141 Of Kim Whankia work by Yves Klein and works of Wayne Thiebaud.
It is precisely here that the concept of “border” evoked by RM makes sense. Korea is not exhibited as an exotic parenthesis within an American museum, but inserted within a broader history of art, in which similarities and differences can finally be observed on the same level.
An exhibition told directly by RM
Then there is an element capable of making the exhibition even more personal. Visitors will not only enter RM’s collection, but also partly into the way in which he himself constructed and interpreted it.
The route will in fact include texts written in his handwriting and an audio guide personally narrated by the artistgiving audiences access not so much to an art history lesson as to the connections that made those works meaningful to them.
And this is perhaps the most interesting point of the entire project. RM does not seem to want to transform his role as a collector into that of a curator who dictates a definitive reading. On the contrary, he insists on the freedom of the spectator and on the possibility that each visitor builds a different relationship with what he encounters.
“I don’t want to dictate how these works should be looked at,” he says.
A phrase that takes on a particular weight pronounced by an artist who grew up within one of the most observed, analyzed and interpreted cultural industries on the planet.
Korean soft power enters one of the great American museums
Reduce MRI x SFMOMA However, yet another global consequence of BTS’s success would be a mistake. The museum’s operation itself shows how the trajectory of the Korean Wave is becoming more complex.
In recent years, South Korean culture has conquered a global space through music, cinema, television series, fashion and beauty. Modern Korean art, however, remains undiscovered territory for a huge part of the international public.
RM inevitably uses its visibility to move that curiosity elsewhere.
A fan who enters SFMOMA might walk out knowing Yun Hyong-keun, Chang Ucchin, or Kim Yun Shin. And this is probably the most interesting form of cultural soft power: not imposing a culture, but creating the desire to know it.
The title itself, Between You and Meseems to suggest a more intimate relationship with respect to the monumentality of the operation. Between those who chose those works and those who will look at them. Between a Korean artist born in 1994 and painters belonging to very distant generations and continents. Between Seoul and San Francisco.
RM speaks of a “small but solid bridge”. Whereas that bridge will take up almost an entire floor of the SFMOMA and put 200 works in front of an international audience, which is probably no longer small.
