Jimin: i told him not to joke around during NORMAL and then he lectured me for like 3 hours when we drank that night. He was like (🐹 you took away my one joy) he was like ( 🐹 you're right, but im still upset)
Jin: thats why i stopped doing it
Namjoon’s speech at the RM x SFMOMA media conference!🥹🥹
🐨: Hello! Good afternoon. Annyeonghaseyo (hi)
🐨: Thank you for coming sincerely!
🐨: Alright. It's been a while that I've made a speech, so yeah…
🐨: Hello, my name is RM! This is my debut as a co-curator. And I'm nervous. Okay, I'm gonna start.
🐨: So, first of all, I'm a very very confused person. You could figure it out later
🐨: Oh, thank you for the music! Thank you!
🐨: I think I revised the speech about like ten times but somehow the more I worked on it, the more confused I became like always.
🐨: When I first started going to museums eight years ago, when I first started looking at art, of course I never imagined that a day like this would come.
🐨: Over the years I've talked a lot about things like the personal and the universal, East, West, Modern, Contemporary. But now that this exhibition is actually about to open I suddenly find myself thinking “Well, does any of that really matter?” Maybe it just needs to be a good, new and an interesting exhibition.
🐨: Two years ago I was in the military. I first got a serious proposal from SFMOMA and I loved it! Of course, since I was in the military at that time maybe I would have been happy with any kind of proposal coming from San Francisco.
🐨: Yeah, but I also thought it could be a good experience before I someday open a kind of space I dream of. And I also thought at a place with this kind of scale and stature, maybe I could borrow someone else's spaces and try something fun.
🐨: So I started this with an innocent heart. I just didn't know that this innocence would eventually make me write, erase, rewrite hundreds of labels and labels.
🐨: As I'm standing here talking to you, I still feel like I'm always drifting and floating somewhere, whether I'm in the U.S. or even when I'm in Seoul where I was born and raised. And, you know, it's not a very pleasant feeling.
🐨: So I think I've leaned on art a lot because of that feeling. Art and music, their language and medium might be slightly different, but they're the same because they both try to say something.
🐨: And also I liked collecting things ever since I was young, and at the same time I do feel guilty about it. Like, “do I really need to carry like so many unnecessary things that I don't even need?” “have I ended up becoming just a boring rich snore?” Well, maybe. Okay. But I thought it would be nice if other people could see those as well. And that's why I wanted to show the people my collection.
🐨: A lot of works in my collection are by Korean modern and contemporary artists. And I'm sure many of those names are still very unfamiliar outside Korea.
🐨: Over the past few years I've seen a lot of other people's collections and I came to think that there aren't many things that show a person like more honestly than a collection they've built over like a long period of time, spending their money, their life, their effort and even giving the walls of their own home. And in that term I guess this exhibition is a pretty long introduction of myself.
🐨: And I feel embarrassed kinda but the thing is sometimes I don't really know why I collected all these things. So I just named one of the sections, “I don’t know but I like it.” That's my honest feeling.
🐨: Likewise I always feel my own limits. Sometimes I feel incredibly proud of myself then incredibly embarrassed by myself, back and forth. In the end I realized I can't really be anything more than just myself.
🐨: So there were two questions that mattered most to me. One was, “Does it move me really?” And another was, “Right now, in 2026, does this artist and does this work still have something to tell us?”
🐨: In an age where everything is consumed so fast, I believe the attitudes of the some of the past artists can resonate even more deeply today.
#RMxSFMOMA