The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is hosting BTS’ RM for his first museum exhibition, and the show is odd, amusing, and deeply personal. RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me runs from October 3 to February 7, 2027. It brings together 142 pieces from RM’s own holdings, along with 36 works drawn from SFMOMA’s collection, which adds up to nearly 200 pieces in all. The display covers paintings, sculptures, furniture, ceramics, textiles and animation.
This exhibition gathers artists including To Sangbong, Yun Hyong-keun, Mark Rothko, Chang Ucchin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Nam June Paik and others. The person who put it together says the show is not about Korean art. Instead, they say it is about good art, period.
The Curator’s Claim
Hyoeun Kim, one of the SFMOMA co-curators, told Deadline that the show avoids a simple historical timeline. “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,'” she 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.”
The choice behind it determines how the exhibition comes across. It does not amount to a survey of the nation. Instead, it functions as a personal selection, run through RM’s own point of view.
The Room That Explains It All
There are eight sections in total at the show, among them Bluewater, Friendscape, Home, Photobuddha, People, Passion, and I Don’t Know, But I Like It and Umber. But one room stands out. It is called I Don’t Know Why, But I Like It. That is where RM’s lighter spirit collides with his more solemn one.
The room’s walls are painted a deep galaxy blue. Throughout the space, rock formations sit in various places. A small model of a modern home with boulders inside is lit from behind by bright white light. The collection includes a photograph featuring Doraemon, abstract works with warped faces and hard lines, pixelated imagery, and childlike scribblings by Cy Twombly. One piece is simply a tidy list of anxieties a person might face in their lifetime.
The room’s title comes from RM’s own inability to explain every impulse behind his collection. “So, I just made a room instead,” he wrote on the wall. The wall-scroll explanation 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.”
The Pikachu Surprise
Then there is Pikachu.
Given how much RM loves Pokémon, it makes sense that the franchise would get some recognition here. What stands out, though, is the tiny animated piece of film showing the famous yellow-and-black thunder monster—it ranks among the room’s funniest inclusions, and few visitors would expect to see it there.
RM is not afraid to be silly, and the inclusion of Pikachu proves it. The exhibition’s display of the character is a reminder that the bombastic musician who leads BTS is also behind it.
RM’s History With Art
The Art Institute of Chicago is where RM’s connection to art began, during a break from touring with BTS back in 2018. He visited the museum then, and since that first encounter, his involvement with art has expanded well past simple collecting.
In 2020, he gave approximately $80,000 to the Korean National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Foundation to help fund and distribute Korean art books for public and school libraries. He later narrated an audio guide for LACMA’s The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art in 2022. This past June, the National Museum of Korea named him its first Global Public Relations Ambassador, a role focused on promoting the value of Korean cultural heritage to audiences at home and around the world.
What RM Said About Fame
During his opening remarks to the media, RM joked about the weight of his own success. “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?” he said. “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.”
That question is answered by the exhibition itself, which reveals a mind that continually makes links, leaping across ages, cultural allusions and visual artists, finding significance in both the grandiose and the apparently trivial.
The Show’s Numbers
| Institution | Role |
|---|---|
| SFMOMA | Co-curator |
| LACMA | Audio guide narrator |
| National Museum of Korea | First Global Public Relations Ambassador |
The show runs through February 7, 2027.
Source material: “BTS’ RM Explores Fame, Identity & Curiosity In Debut Art Exhibition ‘Between You And Me’ At SFMOMA,” Deadline.
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