BTS’s RM Hangs Yun Hyong-keun Beside Rothko in His SFMOMA Curating Debut

RM has a problem with the phrase “the Korean Rothko.” So in Between You and Me, his first show as a curator, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he hung a painting by Yun Hyong-keun, the Dansaekhwa pioneer who keeps getting that label, right beside Mark Rothko’s No. 14.

“Yun is often introduced as ‘the Korean Rothko’ — a convenient shorthand for an unfamiliar name,” RM wrote in the wall text, as Hypebeast reported. “But I didn’t want to leave Yun in anyone’s shadow. So I hung the two side by side.”

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For RM, Yun is personal. He owns more than a dozen of the painter’s works. Yun’s Blue (1972) is on the cover of RM’s 2022 solo album Indigo, which opens with a song called “Yun,” featuring Erykah Badu.

What’s in the Show

The exhibition opened Oct. 5 and runs until Feb. 7, 2027. RM co-curated it over two years with SFMOMA’s América Castillo and Hyoeun Kim, pairing about 145 works from his collection with a few dozen from the museum’s. He wrote the eight section titles by hand, among them “Friendscape,” “Home,” “Photo Buddha” and “I don’t know, but I like it,” and voiced the audio guide in Korean and English.

The Korean art alone spans nearly 1,500 years, Kim told The Art Newspaper, from a sixth-century earthenware figurine and Joseon dynasty works to modern and contemporary names including Kim Whanki, Chang Ucchin, Kim Yun Shin and Kwon Jinkyu. SFMOMA’s holdings add Nam June Paik, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd and Henri Matisse, and the curators set up conversations across the two collections: Chung Sanghwa with Martin, To Sang-bong with Giorgio Morandi, Yoo Youngkuk with Milton Avery. There’s even an early Pikachu animation cel.

“A Pretty Long Introduction of Myself”

At the opening on Sept. 29, RM admitted he had rewritten his speech about 10 times. “There aren’t many things that show a person more honestly than a collection they’ve built over a long period of time, spending their money, their life, their effort,” he said, according to Billboard. “This exhibition is a pretty long introduction of myself, and I feel embarrassed, kind of.”

He was frank about why he collects, too. “I still feel like I’m always drifting and floating somewhere,” he said. “I think I’ve leaned on art a lot because of that feeling.” Choosing the works came down to two questions, he told the press preview: “does it move me, really?” and whether, “right now in 2026,” the artist and the work “still have something to tell us.”

Why It Matters

It started in 2018, when RM walked into the Art Institute of Chicago on a BTS tour stop and asked himself why he couldn’t name any Korean artists. Eight years on, he is the National Museum of Korea’s first global ambassador, fans have a verb for his gallery habit (“Namjoon-ing”), and SFMOMA has a blockbuster: on Oct. 7 the museum said member previews were fully booked, opening weekend had sold out and 50,000 ticket reservations had already been made.

RM himself was due back on the road with BTS when the ARIRANG World Tour resumed on Oct. 2 in Colombia. Between You and Me stays up until Feb. 7, 2027. As he put it at the opening, “sometimes an outsider can bring in a new breeze.”