It was a shock to see works that he knew from reproductions in person. “It was almost like Stendhal syndrome,” he said, referring to the condition whereby art induces physical symptoms in a viewer, like lightheadedness or a quickened heart rate. Paintings by Seurat and Monet captivated him. Sitting in his hotel room while on tour in 2018, deciding what to do during some downtime, RM opted to venture to the Art Institute of Chicago. (He adopted the stage name formally in 2017 to replace the moniker Rap Monster.) He grew up near Seoul, and his parents “did take me to museums, but I don’t think I enjoyed it that much,” he said. Which makes it remarkable that his passion for visual art came about through “serendipity, more of an accidental encounter,” said RM, whose given name is Kim Namjun. “He is throwing away the kind of barrier between the art institutions - galleries and museums - and younger people,” she said in an interview at her gallery, PKM, in Seoul. The veteran dealer Park Kyung-mee credits the singer and rapper with making art more accessible to the general public. BTS’s fervent fans (who call themselves Army) have used his social-media posts and press reports to follow after him, boosting attendance at the places that he hits. A room there is devoted to his favorite artist, On Kawara, who spent his career making austere darkly colored paintings that bear the date of their creation in white text.ĭia was the latest stop in a far-ranging art journey that RM, 27, has been on over the past few years as he has been building an art collection and thinking about opening an art space. This time, he said, “I went with my friends, and I’m just a visitor buying tickets.” They jumped aboard a Metro-North train headed to Dia Beacon, the Minimalist art Xanadu in the Hudson Valley. “It felt really strange to be in Grand Central for the second time with so many people,” he told me one recent afternoon, sitting in the Seoul headquarters of Hybe, the entertainment firm behind the boy band. Late last year, RM returned as a civilian. SEOUL - RM, the leader of the South Korean pop group BTS, first visited Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to perform for Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show.” It was early 2020, before the coronavirus lockdown, and in middle of the night, joined by a sizable dance crew, BTS’s seven members put on a raucous display for their single “ON” in the otherwise empty hall.
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