Most celebrities associate with art in the easiest possible way. Show up at a gallery opening, get photographed beside something expensive, let the proximity do the work. RM of BTS operates on a completely different level — and a catalog published this month is the latest proof of that.
Back in 2022, RM donated funds to the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation, a body affiliated with the Korea Heritage Service that works to document and preserve Korean cultural heritage held in institutions abroad. That donation has now produced something real and tangible: a catalog titled "It's ___ Here: Korean Paintings Shining Abroad," documenting 24 significant Korean paintings currently sitting in major museum collections outside Korea.
The catalog covers roughly 400 years of Korean painting — from the early Joseon era through the 20th century. Landscapes, portraits, bird-and-flower works, documentary paintings, folding screens, hanging scrolls. Every piece comes with high-resolution images and detailed scholarly commentary, but the whole thing is designed to be readable by anyone, not just academics.
Two of the works give a sense of what's inside. One is an eight-panel folding screen called "Welcoming Banquet of the Governor of Pyeongan," now held at the Peabody Essex Museum in the United States. It depicts a banquet held in 1826 to honor the top candidates who passed Korea's notoriously grueling state examinations. Another is "Snowscape with Figures," a hanging scroll from 1584 at the Cleveland Museum of Art — described by the museum as a rare surviving example of early Joseon painting. The artist, Kim Si, withdrew from public life after his father fell from political power. The Cleveland Museum reads the lonely scholar in the snow not as a simple landscape but as something more personal — the artist's inner world, painted from grief and retreat.
These works are in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, and other countries. Most Koreans have never seen them. Repatriating cultural objects is a slow, politically complicated process and the Foundation doesn't pretend otherwise. The catalog is the alternative — make the work visible even when the object itself can't come home.
This isn't RM's only move in this space. He previously donated toward restoring a royal Joseon robe at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was named Art Sponsor of the Year by the Arts Council Korea in 2020. He also has a solo exhibition, "RM x SFMoMA," opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in October 2026, featuring 200 pieces from his personal collection alongside works from the museum's own holdings.
For a pop star, this is an unusually coherent and sustained cultural project. The catalog is the latest piece of it.