RM, With Sincerity
Note: In keeping with our intentions for this blog, we hope on each member’s birthday to describe ways in which BTS’s artistry and sincerity move us: a tribute to each as our gift to them. In this essay celebrating RM’s birthday, we write about the sense of purpose, generosity, and love with which he shares aspects of his life on his Instagram account. Happy Birthday, Kim Namjoon!
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RM is a master at communicating his humanity, gratitude, and sincerity. When asked, “How are you revealing yourself?,” in his interview with Learning from Antiquity: RM of BTS, he replied:
“The best way is obviously through an album or content. I also try to share my life more on Instagram. I’m showing a kind of vulnerability. I get attacked because some people react that it’s too much for an idol to show. But for me, it is a way of saying, “I love you” to people.”
For a global star with 46.6 million Instagram followers, his account is remarkably personal. His posts and stories include his BTS bandmates & friends, behind the scenes of his recording & music videos, art in museums & public settings, magazine covers, album & video still photos, and random moments from his life, such as working out in the gym and watching TV & singing along at home. Many posts portray what his fans refer to as #Namjooning, turning his given name into a hashtag for his adventures out of the spotlight, enjoying nature and visiting places.
His Instagram username is @rkive, personal in that it recalls his stage name, RM, and a signature play on words as a homonym for “archive.” He is archiving his life, using a word common to the way art is held and cataloged in museums and libraries. However, his photos are often in random order, not grouped by category or time period; the account feels simultaneously spontaneous and curated. The personal time photos are not always “artistic” and sometimes seem randomly composed, the kind you share with family. He trusts the viewer to interpret these with the same love and appreciation he shows to others.
He also demonstrates his love and sincerity through sharing his journey with the art world. Please enjoy the following essay from May 1, 2024, in which Andreina explores how RM uses his Instagram to share his powerful and unique perspective on art and the human experience.
— Kim
“F**k the algorithm” — Art, curation and influence in late-stage Internet
A couple of days ago, RM (Kim Namjoon), the rapper, writer, and leader of BTS, unarchived the entirety of his Instagram history. His posts go back to December 2021, when all BTS members opened their Instagram accounts. In the last several months, RM had, seemingly randomly, “deleted” or archived posts a few or whole chunks at a time.
After he restored his Instagram, which previously only had about six photos related to his upcoming second solo album, Right Place, Wrong Person (May 24, 2024), I spent more than two hours on a virtual museum visit. This is because almost all of RM’s photos throughout the years are about art, including dozens of pictures of individual pieces or artworks and the spaces that contain them.
The posts usually consist of a series of photos, starting with a formal image of an artwork–a painting, sculpture, or installation. These photos highlight the artwork by itself; for example, a single photo of a painting on a wall, the museum label sometimes visible, sometimes not. A selection of artworks follows, which RM photographs in a similar way. His photos always appear to accurately capture the lighting of the gallery or museum and provide a good sense of the gallery space.
He often finishes these posts with photos of the outside gardens or open spaces next to the museums or galleries he visits. Sometimes, evocatively, he adds a final picture of a post-visit snack, meal or drink. RM also appears in a couple of photos for most visits, usually shown as a spectator through which we see the art pieces. The effect is immersive, calming, and instructive against all accepted truths about the chaos and superficiality of most online experiences nowadays. It’s the closest to a museum aesthetic experience through a phone or computer screen.
This is remarkable in many ways. RM is a musician and an outsider in the art world, as he described himself in a New York Times article about his art patronage. Since he is from South Korea, he shows a lot of art from South Korean artists, both in world-renowned museums and small galleries.
His “Instagram gallery” functions as a personal space to share his love for art, a platform to introduce new artists to his followers, and a direct commentary on the state of art, creativity, and taste in the 21st century. And he is not making this statement in a vacuum. His lyrics for BTS are full of literary references, but more recently, in his solo album, Indigo(2022), art had a central role.
“Yun,” the opening track of that album, is inspired by the work, life and philosophy of Yun Hyong-keun, a South Korean painter and leading figure in the Dansaekhwa movement in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. One of Yun’s paintings appears on the cover of that album. “Yun” is RM’s statement as an artist embarking on the second chapter of a stratospherically successful career in which he declares, inspired by Yun’s own words, “I want to be a human before I do some art.” In his Tiny Desk concert to support the release of Indigo, he explained that the “song is about the painter and me […], the communication, life and death.” In “Wild Flower,” the main title of the album, he addresses his desperate desire to honour the integrity of his dreams, a growing struggle as a musician and idol in the hyper-paced K-pop industry and as the leader of the biggest band in the world right now.
“Artificial intelligence needs to get lost, f*** the algorithm“ RM raps in “All Day,” a song from Indigo he has explained is “about tastes and preferences in this age of algorithm.” “It’s gotten much harder than before to have your own colour and voice. Is this really me?” However, his preoccupation with remaining connected with his humanity as an artist and an individual runs deep throughout his music and work.
In a time when algorithms almost certainly direct every single one of the choices we make on the Internet and where AI has infiltrated every corner of it, RM’s generous but carefully curated account is almost an anomaly. Though his feed includes promotional posts of his music, a handful of magazine covers, and a couple of advertisements, his account seems free of commercial considerations. The cynical may think that an Instagram account with millions of followers is intrinsically commercial, but I choose to believe in a greater artistic intent.
In a recent podcast episode titled “Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?,” technology writer and Internet observer Nilay Patel talks at length about the realities of life online and the terrifying dangers we may face in the near future:
“What happens when Spotify is overrun by A.I. music? You can see it coming. What happens when you can type into Spotify, ‘Man, I’d really like to listen to a country song. Just make me one.’ And no one down the line has to get paid for that. Spotify can just generate that for you.”
An online world where AI generates the music you listen to, the films you watch, and the novels you read, where the technology bypasses the artist and the human to create a piece of “content,” is dystopian and not only detrimental to the artist, musicians and writers but the audiences as well. It’s a great irony that at a moment where music from all over the world and every genre is more accessible than ever, the platforms we use to discover it narrow our choices into increasingly uniform and safe ones.
RM also curates his Instagram Stories in a similar way to his permanent posts. These Insta-stories consist of sharing a song directly from a music app like Spotify; he has “recommended” over 300 songs to date. ARMY has collected the songs in long-running playlists that they update every time RM shares a new song.
We are in the era of the influencer. But who is really an influencer? And what should they influence us about? Today, the word rarely describes an individual who is influential because of their ideas or creative work; it’s almost wholly associated with a type of marketing online and the number of followers instead of the quality of content. RM offers a respite among the ads, the transactional, or the algorithmically directed through his Instagram account. He shares his images of paintings, sculptures and art installations, mostly all contemporary, and a lot of it conceptual art, not with a niche group of art lovers but with a vast, global and extraordinarily diverse group of people: his fans, ARMY.
In so doing, he is making the art he shares much more accessible, eliminating many barriers preventing many people from engaging with art. His museum and art gallery posts display the art as worthy of study and attention, and as generating a genuine aesthetic experience; they also demystify the art viewing process. Many of the museums and galleries in South Korea or abroad that he has visited report significant spikes in visitors after he publishes his posts.
A secondary but more complex layer to his art archive (or “rkive,” his handle name) is how this ongoing study of art, literature, history, music, etc., influences his work as a musician.
In a way, once an album is released, the traces of his thought process and the philosophical and artistic explorations we hear in the music can probably be found in the posts in his account; the images and songs preserved snapshots of what his world looked and sounded like during the writing and recording of the album.
Though numbers are irrelevant to me most of the time, I share some here as an illustration.
Museums by Instagram Followers: The Louvre Museum — 5.1 million; The Met Museum — 4.3 million; The Guggenheim — 2.7 million; The National Gallery, London — 2.1 million; The Rijksmuseum — 927,000; The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea — 259,000.
RM of BTS: 46.2 million.
RM’s second solo album, Right Place, Wrong Person, was released on May 24, 2024.
— Andreina
This essay was originally published in The Things We Love.
Essay edited by Gabriela Mörken-Romero.
