Bangtan Herman Notes: Between You and Me: Namjooning is Life

When RM talked to the press at the SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last September 29, he was sincere, vulnerable, and the happiest I have seen him with the media in a while. I also enjoy seeing him be, become, and keep becoming. This art exhibit, which he co-curated, feels like a full circle of what he has always written about in his songs and in many of BTS’s music: agency. Choice. The right to decide who you are beyond what an industry has made of you. You can’t control my shit. And for years, he has been insistent and persistent in asserting the person behind the idol persona of an industry that dictates and manufactures.

So much of that has echoed through his work, from BTS’s music to his solo albums. And now, through art, he gets to make another kind of statement. It’s not look at me, but come and look at what I have been looking at. And in art, we find our truest humanity.

So when he said that South Korea experienced losses through colonization and the speed with which it reared its tail when it became a democracy, it also produced and created bright and shiny things, I took that thought with me. I am walking through a season of loss and losing.

With Papa’s inevitable journey to the other side, I find myself painting, creating, making pottery, and just listening to my body. I don’t know where this will lead me. I just know that being in the here and now is the better way to live this one given life to the fullest.

Here’s to more Namjooning in the future!

Bangtan Herman Notes: ARMY Glow Up: I Stayed. I Waited. I Glowed Up. 💜

Finalist at the Catholic Mass Media Awards: The Disaster Ready Kids Series

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Poetry: Gahum

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Bangtan Hermana Notes: ARMY Glow Up: What We Make While We Wait

In 2022, while BTS began their military chapter, I made a promise to myself through the ARMY Glow Up campaign: if I was going to wait, I would not simply wait. I would learn something, make something, nurture a skill, and keep my creative fire alive.

That was how this cyanotype began with Indigo, with Namjoon’s Wild Flower, and with my own curiosity about turning light, plants, and chemistry into an image. The first print experimental. Then came a digital reproduction with the help of Sin So. I then framed a version of it and eventually I was able to write a poem for it: “a flower does not bloom for beauty alone / it is for bearing fruit / a truth laden with thorns.” I was simply making, learning, and playing through a season of waiting, loss, grief and holding on. I didn’t know where else the work would go.

And now, look.

@atta_joy_ca an ARMY in San Francisco noticed my cyanotype prints and has shared the newest reproduction of this particular print, Wild Flower. And it was reprinted with my permission, as part of the gift bags prepared for the press preview of RM’s exhibition at the San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art next month. From a little cyanotype experiment in the Philippines to San Francisco. Wow. This is what ARMY Glow Up means to me. We don’t just wait for our artists to return. We use the waiting to become more capable of making the things we dream of making.

BTS were growing in their own chapter. So was I. So were we.

This one found its way to San Francisco. And at RM’s curated art exhibit at SFMOMA, no less. Who knows where the next one will go?