BTS’ RM Explores Fame, Identity & Curiosity In Debut Art Exhibition ‘Between You And Me’ At SFMOMA

When you enter RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me, it’s almost impossible not to think about the person whose name appears everywhere. RM (short for Rap Monster) is, after all, one of the most recognizable musicians in the world. As the leader of BTS, he has spent years performing on the world stage and existing in a state of near-constant visibility. But inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the scale of that fame begins to feel almost beside the point. What’s on display here isn’t RM the celebrity. It’s just him: Kim Namjoon, a 32-year-old private citizen from Seoul, South Korea, who happens to have a penchant for finding beauty in everyday life through art. RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me opens on October 3 and runs until February 7, 2027. It’s his first time as a co-curator and the first museum show of 142 pieces from his own collection. Along with 36 works from SFMOMA, the exhibition brings together nearly 200 pieces by Korean and international artists, spanning centuries and many art forms—paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, textiles, and animation. Artists include To Sangbong, Yun Hyong-keun, Mark Rothko, Chang Ucchin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Nam June Paik, and others. Watch on Deadline RM insisted on variety. “There’s not a singular style, there’s no singular medium,” SFMOMA co-curator Hyoeun Kim told Deadline. “He has a painting, sculpture, furniture, ceramic, fabric, and then animation [all in the same space].” RM (Kim Namjoon) reflects on his love for art collecting and how he went about choosing the pieces for his @SFMOMA exhibition collaboration, #RMxSFMOMA: Between You and Me:“In an age where everything is consumed so fast, I believe some of the attitudes of some of the past… pic.twitter.com/rZeJBBHt4l— Deadline (@DEADLINE) September 30, 2026 Since the works aren’t arranged as a linear historical timeline of Korean art, it makes you wonder what RM wanted to say by mixing artists from different times and cultures. “From the beginning, we didn’t really want to highlight something that was just like, ‘Oh, this is going to be an exhibition about Korean art,’” Kim explained. “This exhibition was about good artists from Korea, and then we also added other artists from America and other international places. We wanted all of these artworks to have a conversation together.” RM has been in conversation with art since, as he told the New York Times, a visit to The Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 during downtime while BTS was on tour. Since then, his relationship with art has extended well beyond collecting. In 2020, he donated approximately $80,000 to the Korean National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Foundation to support the production and distribution of Korean art books for public and school libraries. He later narrated an audio guide for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA)The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art in 2022. And this past June, the National Museum of Korea appointed him as its first Global Public Relations Ambassador, a role focused on helping promote the value of Korean cultural heritage to audiences at home and around the world. Wooden Geese on display at RMxSFMOMA’s Bluewater room Destiny Jackson But Between You and Me doesn’t feel like a celebrity checking another cultural box. If anything, RM seems almost suspicious of the idea that his collection needs to make him look sophisticated. “Do I really need to carry so many unnecessary things that I don’t even need? Have I ended up becoming just a boring, rich snore?” RM said jokingly during his opening remarks to the media. “I’m always drifting and floating somewhere, whether I’m in the U.S. or even when I’m in Seoul, where I was born and raised, and it’s not a very pleasant feeling,” RM remarked. “So I think I’ve leaned on art a lot because of that feeling.” The answer to his question, as offered by the exhibition, offers little evidence of pretentiousness. Instead, it reveals a mind constantly making connections, jumping between eras, cultural references and visual artists, finding meaning in both the grandiose and the seemingly insignificant. Split into eight sections titled Bluewater (파아란 물), Friendscape (친구가 있는 풍경), Home (집), Photobuddha (포토붓다!), People (사람들), Passion (열정), I Don’t Know, But I Like It (말로 설명은 안 되는데, 좋아) and Umber (다색), the exhibition serves up a little bit of thought-provoking discourse about certain aspects of one’s state of being. However, during our preview, there was one room in particular that felt like the exhibition’s beating heart—a place where RM, the bombastic musician, and the more pensive Kim Namjoon meet. RM (Kim Namjoon) of BTS reveals what his @SFMOMA exhibition collaboration, #RMxSFMOMA: Between You and Me, has in store, including 142 artworks from his personal collection: “I tried to make this exhibition as interesting and new as I could… It makes me very happy that one… pic.twitter.com/SF0NlYGVvs— Deadline (@DEADLINE) September 30, 2026 I Don’t Know Why, But I Like It is perhaps the least inclined to behave like a traditional museum gallery. The walls are a deep galaxy blue. Rock formations sit throughout the space. A small model of a modern home with boulders inside is backlit by bright white light. There’s a photograph featuring Doraemon, abstract works with warped faces and hard lines, pixelated imagery, and childlike scribblings by Cy Twombly. One seemingly unassuming portrait is simply a tidy list of anxieties a person might face in their lifetime. Pikachu animation celluloid at RMxSFMOMA in the I Don’t Know Why, But I Like It room Destiny Jackson The room’s title comes from RM’s inability to explain every impulse behind his collection. As you enter the room, scribbled on the wall, he explains that he was asked again and again to articulate why he liked the works gathered here, but he couldn’t convey their meaning. “So, I just made a room instead,” he wrote. It’s an honest take to place on the walls of one of the first exhibitions of its kind inside one of the country’s most high-profile museums. The wall-scroll explanation also reads: “…They’re simply things that I like. But when you think about it, that’s how everyone lives. A captured image, a sentence that passed by, a playlist for working out, a strangely shaped pebble picked up from the beach… even a corner of the heart is, in the end, just each person’s own small exhibition. I don’t know why, I just like it. And honestly, that’s enough.” But then in the profundity there is Pikachu. Considering RM’s well-known love for Pokémon, it’s not exactly surprising to see it honored in some way. However, the small animated celluloid depicting the iconic yellow-and-black thunder-magic monster is one of the room’s funniest—and almost unexpected—inclusions. While speaking to Deadline, co-curator Kim laughed while acknowledging the mouse-type Pokémon just hanging out in the room. “It’s hard for me to pick a favorite piece, but the fact that there’s a Pikachu amidst all of these other brilliant pieces too says a lot about [RM’s] mind.” Interestingly enough, to RM, the beloved Pikachu seemingly symbolizes the way he grapples with fame, identity and isolation. “This Pikachu looks a little lonely,” RM explained on the museum marker located at the foot of the celluloid. “Usually he’s running, firing thunderbolts, always by your side—but the moment he becomes a cel he drops right out of the story. No background, no next scene, no voice. One expression. Come to think of it, this is the first time he’s ever held still. Even Pikachu needs a break.” It’s an observation from RM that perhaps unintentionally ties this chaotic room of ideas together, as his own life has rarely afforded him much stillness. In both the literal and figurative sense, this museum stop offers a momentary pause in the middle of BTS’ current 11-month tour, with the group set to embark on its Latin American leg in just a few days. There is something cheekily fitting about an artist and a character, both defined by perpetual motion and popularity, being considered in a moment when they are finally allowed to be still. During his speech to the media, RM also called himself “a very, very confused person.” Still, what emerges from I Don’t Know Why, But I Like It feels less like confusion than an unusually expansive curiosity. Sure, there’s no obvious linear style, as a string of lights by Felix Gonzalez-Torres sits in the same room as a ceramic vase by Yoshimoto Nara, but the room invites you to pay the same attention to each piece. “My only hope is that this exhibition can be a small but sturdy bridge for many,” RM said. The many, no doubt, include those outside the BTS stratosphere, but it’s no secret that the exhibition will be a bridge connecting tens of thousands of fans in droves to support their favorite rapper. Even during the media and donor-only preview, BTS fans, known as ARMY, showed out at SFMOMA, handing out handmade gift bags that included stickers, bracelets, postcards, treats, and a fanzine, along with other insider references only fans with years of being entrenched in fandom can appreciate and then share with newcomers. One humorous bookmark, labeled “The Art of Namjooing,” defines this as “the act of living as Kim Namjoon,” listing things he does in his spare time, such as “taking walks through parks, admiring nature, hanging out with crabs and having fun with friends.” This feeling of ease might be what makes Between You and Me feel so personable. The exhibition acknowledges the enormous machinery of RM’s fame without asking visitors to spend their time admiring it. Instead, it asks them to engage with all types of international art, from the well-known to the unfamiliar, with their own reactions, and perhaps to sit with the emotional and physical connections to things they’ve overlooked in their own lives. RM has spent much of his career creating things for other people to consume through songs, albums, dance moves and performances. Here he is providing a different type of access by showing people the things that made him look twice, evidence of a mind that is always in constant flux, moving, absorbing, questioning, connecting and changing behind all the glitz and glamour of his lifestyle. “People say this is an age when everything is connected. Yet, I still live on the boundaries. Seoul and San Francisco, onstage and beneath the stage, me in front of painting and someone behind it. I have always lived somewhere in between… it would be wonderful if this, too, is a flower blooming at a boundary. It’s OK to walk slowly. Pause wherever your heart comes to rest, catch your breath, and I hope you will take a moment to smell the flowers.” RM wrote on the exhibition wall. RM may claim to be a little confused about why he likes some of these things. But perhaps that’s the beauty of it. He doesn’t need every piece of the world to resolve into an answer before he lets himself be moved by it telling the media: “In an age where everything is consumed so fast, I believe some of the attitudes of some of the past artists can resonate even more deeply today.” And between you and me, that’s a message well-received.