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The leader of the world’s biggest band is nervous.

“I think I revised this speech about 10 times, but somehow the more I worked on it, the more confused I became, like always,” said K-pop star and BTS rapper RM on Tuesday at a preview of a show he has co-curated at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called “RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me”

Three years ago, RM held an anonymous show in South Korea, but this is the first proper exhibition he has staged. For many of his fans — some of whom wait outside the museum trying to get a glimpse of him — his favorite activities, including museum-hopping, bicycling and being out in nature, come as no surprise. There is even a word for it: “namjooning,” a play on the singer’s first name, Namjoon. But still, the exhibition is the rare chance to view RM as a serious art collector; someone who values Korean identity in art but also loves works from many genres, eras and countries.

Philip Guston, Untitled (Red and Black Book), 1969; from the collection of RM.

(The Estate of Philip Guston / Hauser & Wirth)

Dressed in a gray T-shirt, dark collared shirt and leather pants, RM’s hair is a light burnt sienna color matching the fur of the stylized tiger on the screen behind him. From a 17th century painting by Lee Won-chan, it’s from his personal collection of more than 400 artworks. For this exhibition, 142 pieces owned by RM will be shown alongside 36 works from SFMOMA for a total of 178 works on display.

RM sees “Between You and Me” as an introduction to his inner life and reflection of contrasting aspects of his personality, whether as a public figure interacting with his adoring fans or an erudite intellectual and avid reader with a reputation as a clumsy and lovable goofball.

RM was on a hiatus from BTS and on the cusp of beginning his mandatory military service in South Korea when SFMOMA first approached him for the project two years ago. As it came to fruition, he sought to answer two main questions when contemplating which works of his collection to share with the public.

Does the artwork move him deeply? And, if the work is from a noncontemporary artist, does the piece have something to communicate in 2026?

“In an age where everything is consumed so fast,” RM explained, “I believe the attitudes of some of the past artists can resonate even more deeply today.

“I’ve always dreamed of seeing different places, times, boundaries and backgrounds all mixed together in harmony,” he continued. “It could be a mess because I’ve never formally studied, and I’m not a ‘curator, curator,’ but in any field sometimes an outsider can bring in a new breeze.”

Wonwoo Lee, “Candy,” 2023; from the collection of RM

(Wonwoo Lee / PKM Gallery)

It’s not RM’s first time working with a museum. In 2023, he partnered with Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art to provide guided audio narration for “The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art”.

At SFMOMA, RM was joined in his effort by two co-curators: SFMOMA project manager América Castillo and assistant curator of painting and sculpture Hyoeun Kim.

Kim, who has long championed Korean artists internationally, was particularly impressed with the diversity of Korean art that RM has amassed, including its “remarkable range.”

“His collection began with 6th century works, moved through the Joseon Dynasty, and continued to major Korean modern and contemporary art. It spans nearly 1,500 years,” Kim said during the preview.

The show is arranged in eight parts and begins with a large white wall at the entrance with the title of the show scrawled in RM’s handwriting. Handwritten touches are found everywhere — “Plz take it in with your eyes and heart” is scribbled on the floor in both English and Korean. The wall text for each piece, which also includes a QR code for audio narration, is composed by RM in both languages.

An inscription on the floor of an SFMOMA exhibit curated by RM of BTS features RM’s writing as part of the wall (and floor) text.

(Christine Terrisse.)

Guests will also receive a zine-style pamphlet with the same homespun appeal explaining each of the eight sections in RM’s words alongside a diagram of the room.

“Blue Water” centers the work of Kim Whanki, the late globe-trotting abstract artist and the first RM says he “fell for.” In addition to Whanki and works by Vija Celmins and Tony Feher, some RM fans might recognize one of Roni Horn’s glass cylinder sculptures from a now-archived Instagram post where it was casually displayed in RM’s apartment.

There’s even a room filled with especially eclectic pieces called “i don’t know..but i like it.” By way of explanation, RM said, “Sometimes I don’t really know why I collected all these things.”

The last room, “Umber” or “Dasaek” (referring to the color of Korean rice fields) might be the most meaningful to the singer. It features works by the late artist Yun Hyong-keun, for whom RM has a particular personal affinity. The cover for his debut solo studio album, “Indigo,” depicts Hyong-keun’s 1972 painting “Blue,” and the album’s lead track, “Yun,” a collaboration with Erykah Badu, kicks off with recorded dialogue from the artist.

Back in 2018, around the same time RM began his art journey with not much formal training in art history, co-curator Castillo began her career with SFMOMA.

At the time, she was in awe of the power of art to connect with people, but frustrated that more people from unconventional backgrounds weren’t being given opportunities to curate major shows, thereby shaping the stories told. Her work on this exhibition is part of a continuing mission to bridge the art world and the ordinary person.

Chang Ucchin, “Road,” 1986, from RM’s collection.

(Chang Ucchin Foundation / Seoul Auction)

This mission guided her through the process of selecting works by famous artists from SFMOMA’s collection to contextualize RM’s pieces from lesser-known but equally important names.

“The first time we pulled a list on the SFMOMA side, we had like 500 options we then dwindled down,” she said in an interview while standing in the “Umber” room. “There were some artworks and specific artists that we knew from the get-go we wanted to be in the show. We wanted them to have a moment. Mark Rothko was definitely one of them.”

The sole Rothko piece in SFMOMA’s collection, “No. 14,” (1960) is featured in one of the final rooms in the exhibition. Adjacent to it is “untitled” (1986-90) by Hyong-keun. In the exhibit pamphlet, RM notes that Hyong-keun’s paintings are often compared to Rothko’s, but “their darkness is not the same.” “To my eyes, if Rothko’s darkness is one that ‘opens’ then Yun’s is the darkness that remains after he endured everything he possibly could,” he writes.

As RM steps into the spotlight of the art world, he is learning to become comfortable with the uncomfortable in-between spaces he occupies. “I started this with an innocent heart. As I’m standing here talking to you, I still feel like I’m always drifting and floating somewhere, ” he said, adding that the feeling comes when he’s in the U.S. but also when he’s in his hometown of Seoul. “It’s not a very pleasant feeling. I think I’ve leaned on art a lot because of that feeling.”

Before the preview, BTS fans, called the ARMY, passed out small gifts to the press, and afterward donors lined up for a special reception. RM’s mother, father and sister even arrived to celebrate, but he didn’t have much time to hang around. He was scheduled to depart for Bogotá, Colombia, to join his bandmates on the Latin American leg of their ARIRANG stadium world tour.

It is time to leave the quiet of the museum for the roar of the crowd.

“RM SFMOMA: Between You and Me” opens to the public on Oct 3, and runs through Feb.7, 2027. For more information visit sfmoma.org

In Philippe Caland’s semi-autobiographical 2003 film “Hollywood Buddha,” his mother, Huguette Caland, plays herself. Wearing her signature white smock, inscribed with a flurry of painted swirls, circles, letters and cross-stitches, the Lebanese artist makes precise gray-blue lines on a canvas spread across her dining room table as her son laments a fickle movie industry.

Filmed in her Venice home, the scene, her three children agree, was true to life. Caland worked constantly: on stretched canvas, on fabric folded in her lap, on a children’s menu, on the wall of her kitchen, or the sleeve of her smock. Whatever was at hand.

“Of course it could be frustrating,” said her daughter Brigitte, an elegant, soft-spoken scholar of Semitic languages who has managed Caland’s estate since her death in 2019.

Brigitte Caland, right, and Charley Caland — the daughter and granddaughter of the Lebanese-born painter, sculptor and fashion designer Huguette Caland — stand in Caland’s former L.A. home and studio.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Sitting in that very home, which Caland had built in 1997, Brigitte recalled the many times her mother invited her over only to continue working as they talked. “I’d go to leave, and she’d put the canvas away, beg me to come back, and as soon as I did, she’d start painting again.” Still, from early on, Brigitte understood the compulsion as evidence of her mother’s resolve. “She had this incredible drive to create.”

“Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines,” opening Sunday at the Hammer Museum, traces that relentless drive across nearly 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures, garments and tapestries. Organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the show comes to Los Angeles as the largest Caland survey in the country to date. Spanning five decades and installed chronologically, it features work from the 26 years she spent immersed in Venice’s creative community even as her practice was largely ignored.

It was Caland’s generous hospitality and boisterous wit that made her custom château a gathering place for a vibrant Westside art circle. Ed Moses, who lived around the corner, visited several times a week; Larry Bell, Frank Gehry, Robert Wilhite and others joined her for long meals and even longer parties. Her work surrounded them, and her studio, the grandest space in the house, stood open just beyond the living room. Yet her guests remained uninterested. “No one,” Brigitte said, “would walk the 10 steps.”

Huguette Caland in Stone Doorway, France, 1970.

(Huguette Caland Estate)

Curator Hannah Feldman sees that tension as central to Caland’s California years. “Instead of supporting and bolstering her as a creative in their midst, she became their salon host,” she said. The lack of recognition, Feldman argues, reverberates through Caland’s heavily impastoed portraits of Moses and her enigmatic late abstractions such as the rectilinear paintings in the “Silent Letter Series.”

“To draw a line is a way to contain one’s emotion, one’s anger, one’s anguish,” wrote Caland of her challenging relations with fellow artists in “Sketchbook 2” (1990-91). “My lines tell the story of my life, of people encountered along the path, people I loved, and found and even lost.”

Caland is perhaps best known for her cheeky, erotic paintings of fulsome body parts and for a biography too often reduced to cliché: the libertine daughter of Lebanon’s first post-independence president who left her husband and children in Beirut to pursue an art career in a less repressed Paris.

Huguette Caland, “Self-Portrait in Smock,” 1992

(Huguette Caland Estate)

Feldman hopes the exhibition, which spans fine-line drawings of entangled lovers and radiant topographical tapestries, will complicate that familiar account. “There’s joy, and there’s sex,” she said, “but there’s also pathos, vulnerability. The search for autonomy is not an easy one; it comes with conflict, strife.”

Caland’s freedom was no doubt hard-won. She first picked up a brush as a married mother of three in her thirties, and only after her father’s death. In her first painting, alternately titled “Soleil rouge” and “Cancer” (Red Sun/Cancer) (1964), hazy concentric circles gather in a crimson orb at the center of the monochromatic plane. Simultaneously a tumor and a light source, the refulgent motif holds grief and release.

Soon after, Caland enrolled in art classes at the American University of Beirut, relinquished much of her constricting couture wardrobe, and adopted a uniform of loose, flowing kaftans, which she would later turn into works of art in their own right. Archival photographs show a glamorous Caland arriving at an event in a floor-length garment bearing painted breasts, a belly button and a triangle of curly pubic hair.

Huguette Caland, “Bribes de corps,” 1973

(Huguette Caland Estate)

Caland moved to France in 1970, leaving her children (then 15, 13 and 12) in Beirut with their father, a French-Lebanese lawyer named Paul Caland. In paintings from that decade, Caland’s imagery of bodies swell, split, meld and dissolve. In “Enleve ton doigt” (Remove Your Finger) (1971), lipstick-red lips receive a pale finger reaching out from a crush of fantastical profiles; two years later, in “Self-Portrait” (Bribes de corps), Caland dispersed a sensual body across a pale pink field interrupted at the lower edge by a slight, shadowed cleft — either buxom cleavage or buttocks.

The distance from her children produced another kind of line: text. Philippe recalled receiving illustrated letters almost every week, filled with drawings, doodles and notes of affection. Most of these were later destroyed when the family house was bombed during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975. “I always knew my mother loved me,” Philippe said. “The family was not torn apart. She took a break, and in the end made a home for us in Paris, where we all landed when the war was raging.”

After the death of her lover, Romanian sculptor George Apostu, whose rough-hewn wood sculptures still populate the house’s patio, Caland’s children encouraged yet another departure. Her eldest son, Pierre, a businessman and former Olympic swimmer, paid for a stay at a friend’s Venice bed-and-breakfast, all but forcing his grieving mother out of Paris and to sunny L.A. Her initial reluctance gave way to affection. The light, arid climate and mountains sloping into the sea reminded her of Lebanon. “She liked that California land sounded like Caland,” Brigitte said.

Huguette Caland works at her home and studio in Venice, date unknown.

(Huguette Caland Estate)

After making Venice her primary residence, Caland collaborated with architect Neil Kaufman on the design for her enclosed château. Its towering, mostly unbroken face and narrow swimming pool suggested a rampart and a moat, but behind the concrete exterior, Caland eliminated every door save the guest bathroom. Long vertical windows opened onto a courtyard shaded by a sprawling olive tree. Art crowded the steep stairwell; it accumulated on scattered plywood and Formica tables and unraveled across the kitchen in an intricate mural composed of tessellated marks that recall Byzantine mosaics and tatreez, a form of traditional Palestinian embroidery.

“There was no distinction for her,” Brigitte said, between the home and the studio, art and life. Caland once described her “very, very mixed media” as including “every single exchange, a look, a smile, a brief encounter.”

That original interior survives in “Hollywood Buddha” and archival photographs. Philippe now lives in the house with his family, and although the concrete exterior remains intact, the rooms and the courtyard have been remodeled around their own aesthetics and routines. Along with the technicolor mural, Caland’s singular sensibility persists in scattered drawings, a bouquet of her preferred 30-inch paintbrushes and a pair of stiff-backed pews. Her presence, too, is felt in the people who now inhabit the space, like her granddaughter Charley, 25, whose easy warmth recalls qualities long ascribed to the matriarch.

The former Venice home and studio of the Lebanese-born painter, sculptor and fashion designer Huguette Caland. The home is still occupied by Caland’s family and no longer looks how it did when she was alive, but her spirit lives on in small details.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

When the Hammer selected Caland for “Made in L.A. 2016,” the honor brought some measure of the local attention that had long eluded her. “If you had to pick one critical turning point for her career,” Pierre said, “it was the inclusion of her work in that show.” For the family, the coming survey fulfills one of her long-held ambitions.

“She told me, ‘Live your life day by day and plan it on a thousand years,’” Philippe said. Only later did he understand that the advice described her own life. “Today, her work is here,” he added. “She continues with it.”

Huguette Caland, “Le grand bleu,” 2012.

(Huguette Caland Estate)

The final painting in the exhibition, an oceanic large-format canvas titled “Le Grand Bleu” (The Great Blue) (2012), once hung high above the central hearth in the Venice house. Surrounded by undulating circles, spots and stripes, red-roofed Lebanese abodes and white-masted schooners traverse an unsettled horizon line. From the dining table below, where a young Charley often helped her grandmother fill blank planes with delicate dots, Caland could look up and see how far her line had taken her.