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| ▲This photo, provided by Big Hit Music, shows RM. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap) |
SEOUL, August 25 (Yonhap) -- U.S leading newspaper NewYork Times (NYT) is focusing on the new role of BTS’ leader RM as “Art Patron.”
NYT reported that Boy group super star RM has centered his collecting on aritsts from home, S.Korea.
RM, who has been gathering “art collection” over the years, told Art Basel, on the fair’s podcast, that he was thinking about opening an art space of some kind.
The newspaper also mentioned that RM has loaned a terra cotta sculpture of a horse by the Korean artist Kwon Jin-kyu to a Seoul Museum of Art, and in 2020 donated 100 million won to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
and was named an Art Sponsor of the Year.
His Art sponsoring is something to take close attention to considering that he is a super influencer with 70 million subscribers on BTS’ YouTube Channel and 37 million followers on his personal Instagram account.
The kind of barrier between old arts and younger people are crumbling down as fans follow the footsteps of RM.
RM said his passion for visual art came about through “serendipity, more of an accidental encounter” during an interview with NYT.
He said he did not enjoy museums that he went as a child with family.
He ventured to the Art Institute of Chicago during some downtime on tour in 2018 and paintings by Seurat and Monet became a turning point for him.
RM said, “It was almost like Stendhal syndrome (the condition whereby art induces physical symptoms in a viewer, like pigheadedness or a quickened heart rate.)”
He, who quite studying when he was 17 because he was a trainee of BTS, also said, “I started to read the books again” after meeting art.
NYT said that a George Nakashima table holds his computer workstation, which has a spare abstract painting by Yun Hyoun-keun, and a wall is hung with more than 20 works, made by key 20th-centry Korean artists like Park Soo Keum, Chang Ucchin and Nam June Paik.
Touring abroad underscored for RM that “my roots are in Korea,” he said, and he has centered his collecting on artists from home, particularly of the generations that lived through the Korean War, military dictatorship and immense economic precarity. He said, “I was able to feel their kind of sweat and blood.”
Surrounded by the work of deceased greats, “I feel like they’re watching me,” adding, “I’m motivated. I want to be a better person, a better adult, because there is this aura that is coming from these artworks on display.”
When he is feeling “tired or let down, I sometimes stand there and have a conversation with them,” he said.
RM imagines a ground-floor cafe and exhibition areas above showing Korean and International artists in ways that appeal to young, saying, “I think that there is something that I can offer as an outsider of the art industry.”
NYT said “RM is charismatic and a quick study, and you could imagine him being an effective politician or a beloved, slightly eccentric professor.”
(This article is translated from Korean to English by Jiwon Woo.)
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