SEOUL - The oldest museum in the Philippines, the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Museum, has launched an interactive exhibition inspired by a term coined by BTS’ RM, whose real name is Kim Nam-joon.
The term “namjooning”, which has entered the Urban Dictionary, refers to visiting museums, communing with nature, biking, appreciating architecture and public art, reading and other forms of self-care.
UST Goes Namjooning: Capturing Moments On Campus aims to “reintroduce UST history and culture (and) was inspired by the social media term coined by BTS leader and main rapper Kim Nam-joon”, according to a report by entertainment portal Koreaboo.
RM, 28, came up with the term in summer 2019, when he was asked by BTS fans, known as Army, what he was up to while on vacation.
He replied: “I’m namjooning.”
The exhibition, which opened last Tuesday and will run till Oct 21, features works of art as well as BTS merchandise and standees.
Founded in 1871, the museum is located in Manila and the exhibition is open to the public.
In recent years, RM has been building an art collection and thinking about opening an art space.
The band’s fervent fans have used his social media posts and press reports to follow after him, boosting attendance at the places that he hits.
Veteran dealer Park Kyung-mee, who spoke to The New York Times for an article last month on the singer and rapper making art more accessible to the public, said: “He is throwing away the kind of barrier between the art institutions – galleries and museums – and younger people.”
RM has also been embracing the role of art supporter, loaning a terracotta sculpture of a horse by South Korean artist Kwon Jin-kyu to a Seoul Museum of Art retrospective that ran until May. In 2020, he donated 100 million won (S$101,400) to South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) so that it could reissue out-of-print art books and distribute them to libraries.
Arts Council Korea, a government-affiliated body, subsequently named him an Art Sponsor of the Year.
“We are very happy that RM, who has a high global influence, is an art lover,” MMCA’s director Youn Bummo said in an e-mail.
That global influence has almost unfathomable reach. BTS’ YouTube channel has more than 70 million subscribers and RM’s Instagram alone has 38 million followers. (MMCA’s has 206,000.)
A 35-minute vlog that he recorded about his visit to the Art Basel fair in Switzerland this past summer has racked up almost six million views. For the insular, impenetrable world, he may be a dream ambassador.
Which makes it remarkable that his passion for visual art came about through “serendipity, more of an accidental encounter”, said RM.
Sitting in his hotel room while on tour in 2018, deciding what to do during some downtime, he opted to venture to the Art Institute of Chicago. Paintings by Seurat and Monet captivated him.
Any time the subject turned to art, the already energetic musician got especially excited. He was with an interpreter, but he usually switched to English (he is very fluent and has said that he learnt from watching the sitcom Friends, 1994 to 2004).
“I quit studying when I was 17 because of this BTS thing, because I was a trainee,” he said, listing all the practice that involved. “But after 10 years, I met art, and I started to read the books again – seriously.”
He is charismatic and a quick study, and you could imagine him being an effective politician or a beloved, slightly eccentric professor.
From an early age, RM was collecting: stamps, coins, Pokemon cards, rare stones (“not expensive ones”) and then toy figures.
A large KAWS Companion stands in his art-filled recording studio at Hybe, but much of his art is older. A George Nakashima table holds his computer workstation, which has a spare abstract painting by Yun Hyong-keun – just three luminous masses of paint – hovering behind it. A wall is hung with more than 20 works, many by key 20th-century South Korean artists such as Park Soo-keun, Chang Ucchin and Nam June-paik.
The BTS leader comes across as an old soul. Asked to define his taste, he mentioned being drawn to art about “eternity, and that comes because of this fast and hectic aura from this K-pop industry”.
His dream of opening an art space is still some way off, but RM imagines a ground-floor cafe and exhibition areas above showing South Korean and international artists in ways that appeal to the young.
“I think there’s something that I can offer as an outsider of the art industry,” he said. NYTIMES
