02

The speech began with a nervous laugh.

Then a phone rang somewhere in the audience, and he thanked its owner for the music. He admitted he was nervous, then told himself, and us, to just get started.

If this sounds as though I were in the room, I wish I had been. The YouTube algorithm served it up one evening, and I was hooked.

This was RM, the leader of the South Korean pop group BTS, a man who walks out in front of 70,000 people a night on a world tour. Here he was opening Between You and Me at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a show built from his own art collection, the works he'd chosen to live with, now on a wall for strangers to see.

The more something matters, the more exposed it feels.

Then he said the thing that stuck with me. The hardest part of the whole project was writing the labels. The small cards beside each work, each explaining in about a hundred words why the piece mattered to him.

Not the curating. Not the opening night.

The labels.

He has always, he said, felt as though he were floating between worlds. He is the leader of one of the most famous bands on earth, and also Kim Namjoon, a 32-year-old who collects art. The show hangs that way too, Korean masters such as Yun Hyong-keun alongside Western painters like Mark Rothko. Of one such pairing, he said simply:

"They resemble each other, but they are not the same darkness. Compare and appreciate them."

Most of us aren't pop stars, but our lives can resemble his, floating, sometimes unsure, between worlds.

The team lead who runs a tense budget meeting at four, negotiates bedtime with a three-year-old at eight, and at ten goes back to the novel he's writing, inspired by his grandparents' migration, now four hundred pages long.

The brand strategist who builds campaigns by day and spends her nights on a documentary about the river she grew up beside, now running dry three months a year.

The policy analyst who drafts other people's reform plans and is quietly sketching a community food co-op of her own.

Sooner or later, each of them faces the same question. How do you know when something is worth pursuing?

It is easier when you're RM. When a world-class museum calls, the question answers itself.

For most of us, nobody calls.

But even with the museum on the line, the part he found hardest was the part no institution could do for him. Sitting down and writing, in a hundred words, why something mattered.

That part was always going to be his. And he didn't treat the show as the final stop.

In that same opening speech, he described the exhibition as a practice run for something he has mentioned before, an art space of his own in Korea, one day.

A practice run. At SFMOMA.

If he can treat SFMOMA as a rehearsal, our next step only has to be a first version of our dream.

The first chapter you let someone read. The first ten minutes of footage. The first meeting about the co-op, in someone else's living room. None of it has to be the answer.

My own steps have been small, and a little hesitant. I'm building work I can do from anywhere, so I can spend more time in Asia, closer to family. Coaching is part of my practice run.

By the time that gallery opens, Namjoon, the collector rather than the pop star, will know things he doesn't know yet. Because he went ahead with this one, nerves and all.

He didn't walk into SFMOMA a curator. He became one by writing the labels, a hundred words at a time.

Let's keep writing ours.