BTS's RM Opens 140-Piece Private Collection to the Public at SFMOMA

BTS's RM stood before a quietly packed room at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the 29th and opened not with authority but with admitted confusion. "I've revised this speech about ten times," he told the assembled press and guests at the private media preview for RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me. "And as always, the more I revised it, the more confused I became."

The admission fit the occasion. The exhibition, which opens on October 3 and runs through February 7 on the museum's seventh floor, is the first time SFMOMA has collaborated with a K-pop artist, and the first time RM's personal art collection has left the private walls of his studio and home for a public institution. Around 140 works from his collection are shown alongside 36 from SFMOMA's own holdings, totaling roughly 180 pieces across eight sections.

A collector's confession

RM, whose legal name is Kim Namjoon, has been acquiring art since his early twenties under the Instagram handle rkive, a portmanteau of his stage name and the word archive. At the preview, he chose to describe the psychological cost of that accumulation rather than its aesthetic achievements.

"I also feel guilt," he said. "Do I really need to carry around this many things that I don't even need? Have I just become a bored person with a bit of money? Maybe. But I thought it would be good if other people could see these things too." He framed the entire exhibition as an extended act of introduction: a collection, he argued, is one of the most honest self-portraits a person can produce, because it encodes money, time, effort, and the literal walls of a home.

The San Francisco Chronicle, covering the event, noted the contrast between RM's confident stage presence and the candid vulnerability he displayed at the closed preview, describing it as "extremely personal and honest."

Korean and Western masters in the same room

The curatorial framework is one of the more considered elements of the show. RM worked directly with SFMOMA curators América Castillo and Kim Hyoeun on the selection and arrangement of works, and he wrote the wall text in both Korean and English, recorded bilingual audio guides in his own voice, and chose the ambient music for each section.

The collection reflects his known range: internationally recognized names such as Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Nam June Paik share space with Korean modern and contemporary artists including Yun Hyong-keun, Park Rehyun, Chang Ucchin, Kwon Ok-yeon, Kim Yunshin, Do Sang-bong, and Kim Whanki. The pairing is not decorative. These are artists who worked through colonization, war, and rapid modernization on one side, and the postwar American and European avant-garde on the other, and the exhibition proposes that their preoccupations with nature, memory, and existence converge.

One section RM titled I Don't Know, But I Like It, a phrase that captures his stated curatorial method: two questions guided every selection, he explained, whether a work genuinely moved him, and whether the artist still had something to say to audiences in 2026. "In an era where everything is consumed too quickly," he said, "I believe the attitude of certain artists from the past can resonate even more deeply today."

An outsider's labor

RM discharged from mandatory military service in June 2025, but the groundwork for this exhibition was laid during that period. He recalled receiving SFMOMA's initial proposal while still in uniform, joking that at the time he "would have been glad to receive any invitation from San Francisco." What followed, by his account, was harder than he anticipated.

"Because I didn't come from the art world, I think I have a little more freedom," he said. "But I was completely untrained in condensing a description of a work into a hundred words. That was the hardest part. I started with pure intentions, and I had no idea that pure intention would mean writing, deleting, and rewriting hundreds of wall labels."

The comment is worth taking at face value. RM has donated 100 million won each to the Cultural Heritage Administration and the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation, earmarked for the conservation and restoration of Korean cultural artifacts abroad, a level of institutional engagement that goes beyond collecting as personal taste. In 2022, Artnet News listed him among its 35 Innovators of the year in the investor category, recognizing a collecting practice that had, by then, already sent ARMY fans to museums across the United States wherever he had been photographed visiting.

That effect was visible even at the closed preview. Dozens of BTS fans, including some who had flown in from London specifically for the opening week, lined the street outside the museum despite the event being restricted to press and invited guests.

What the exhibition asks

Asked during the Q&A what he hoped visitors would take away, RM pulled back from any curatorial ambition and returned to something simpler. "This exhibition is an introduction to me," he said. "I hope people can get to know me a little better through it. And I just hope they feel how fun and enjoyable it can be to go see an exhibition. That's all."

The show opens at SFMOMA on October 3 and runs through February 7.