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January 2020. BTS had just played Wembley, hit number one in the US, and were six weeks away from dropping Map of the Soul: 7. The obvious next move for a K-pop group at that altitude would have been a luxury fashion deal or a tech endorsement. Instead, on January 14, the band sponsored a virtual forest at London's Serpentine Galleries and quietly launched a five-city, four-continent contemporary art project called CONNECT, BTS. It was a serious bid for art-world legitimacy, and the way Big Hit pulled it off still shapes how K-pop dances with high culture today.
Why a K-pop group bankrolled contemporary art in the first place
You do not commission Antony Gormley and Tomas Saraceno by accident. CONNECT, BTS was an extremely deliberate brand-uplift play by Big Hit Entertainment, now HYBE, and it sat right at the center of a long campaign to drag K-pop out of the "teenage entertainment" box that Western press kept stuffing it back into. Funding 22 동시대 미술 artists at MoMA and Tate biennale tier sends one message: take this group seriously, take this scene seriously. The same instinct shows up later in RM's Vogue Korea Met Museum tour, in his Yun Hyong-keun and Lee Bae collecting, and in HYBE briefing investors using cultural-capital language. 글로벌 브랜딩 in K-pop is not just about ad spend, it is about prestige laundering, and CONNECT, BTS was the most expensive PR-as-art-patronage move the genre had ever attempted.
The 5-city footprint that just happened to match BTS's tour map
Look at the cities: London, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, New York. Now look at the Love Yourself: Speak Yourself stadium run from 2019 and the Map of the Soul Tour BTS were about to launch in spring 2020. The overlap is not subtle. London Wembley, MetLife in New York, Estadio Unico La Plata in Argentina, Olympic Stadium in Seoul. Berlin slots in as the European art-press capital that art directors covet. CONNECT, BTS was strategically layered on top of existing touring infrastructure, hitting the cities where ARMY density was highest and where international art-world press paid the most attention. That is industry chess, not coincidence. The art project softened each market for the tour and the tour, in turn, was supposed to drive foot traffic back to the exhibitions. COVID broke half of that plan, but the design was elegant.
London: Catharsis at the Serpentine, where it all opened
The Serpentine North gave Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen the floor to debut Catharsis, a single-continuous-shot digital simulation of a reimagined old-growth forest. The work ran from January 14 through March 6, 2020, both inside the Zaha Hadid-designed gallery and online at catharsis.live, and Hans Ulrich Obrist himself hosted the opening. That detail is everything. Obrist is the most cited curator alive, and the Serpentine is where Damien Hirst and Marina Abramovic have shown. Opening CONNECT, BTS there, not at a pop-up or a celebrity space, was the signal to the art press that this was not a stunt. ARMY showed up in numbers, livestreamed the band's video introduction, and produced one of the strangest crowd shifts the Serpentine had ever seen.
Berlin's Rituals of Care and Buenos Aires's record-breaking Aerocene
Berlin's leg ran January 15 to February 2 at Gropius Bau, where director Stephanie Rosenthal and curator Noemie Solomon assembled Rituals of Care, a performance program with over 13 artists including Bill Fontana, Cevdet Erek, and Maria Hassabi. Then Buenos Aires went bigger. Argentine artist Tomas Saraceno, a regular at the Venice Biennale and known for his cosmic spider-web installations at the Palais de Tokyo, used CONNECT, BTS funding to launch Fly with Aerocene Pacha at Salinas Grandes salt flat. A fully solar-powered, untethered, fossil-fuel-free human flight that set six world records, in solidarity with Indigenous communities whose land was being torn up for lithium mining. Over 500 ARMY trekked to the remote Jujuy salt lake to witness it. A K-pop fanbase showing up at a salt flat in northern Argentina to watch an environmental art performance was a sentence no one expected to write.
Seoul and New York: Yiyun Kang, Ann Veronica Janssens, and Gormley's 18-kilometre line
Seoul opened January 28 at Dongdaemun Design Plaza, that other Zaha Hadid masterwork, with two shows running through March 20. Korean artist Yiyun Kang built Beyond the Scene, a projection-mapping installation in a mirrored cube that translated BTS's signature choreography into 360-degree light. The title is itself a Korean pun on BTS, since 방탄소년단 is officially translated as "Beyond the Scene." Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens presented Green, Yellow and Pink, a 15-meter-wide sensory mist room of pure colored light. New York closed the run on February 5 at Pier 3 of Brooklyn Bridge Park, where British sculptor Antony Gormley installed New York Clearing, a single line drawn through space with 18 kilometres of square aluminium tubing rising nearly 50 feet at its highest point. Gormley is the artist behind the Angel of the North. The reported budget for a public-scale Gormley commission runs north of one million dollars on its own. BTS covered all five cities, free to the public, no ticket, no sponsor signage at the entrance.
Why the art world took it seriously: RM, Daehyung Lee, and zero whiff of vanity
Most celebrity-art tie-ins get a polite mention and a quick burial. CONNECT, BTS stuck because two pieces of curatorial credibility held the whole thing up. First, artistic director Daehyung Lee was a real curator with weight. He had curated the Korean Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, served as Hyundai Motor Company's art director for six years connecting Tate, LACMA, and MMCA, and sat on the jury for Ars Electronica's STARTS Prize. He was not a publicist with a budget. Second, RM was already a publicly serious collector. He visits Frieze Seoul, MMCA, Kukje Gallery, Amorepacific Museum of Art, and donated a Kwon Jin-kyu terracotta sculpture to the Seoul Museum of Art before going to the military. The art world reads authenticity quickly. When the BTS member who curated the project actually owns Yun Hyong-keun paintings and reads Yanagi Soetsu, the gallerists stop rolling their eyes. By 2026, RM is on the Korea Art Market Power 20 and has an upcoming SFMOMA show. CONNECT, BTS planted that seed.
ARMY at the gallery: how K-pop fandom changed who walks into a contemporary art space
Walk into a Tomas Saraceno show in a normal week and you will see art school students, gallerists, a few collectors, the usual demographic in head-to-toe black. Now imagine that same gallery suddenly receiving busloads of fans in their twenties who arrived from another country, queued for hours, bought the catalogue, photographed every label, and could quote artist bios back at the docents. Curators at the Serpentine, Gropius Bau, Centro Cultural Kirchner, and DDP all reported the same shift during CONNECT, BTS. ARMY were not just there for the BTS-adjacent buzz, they treated the art as part of getting to know their group, and that turned out to be the most powerful long-tail effect of the whole project. Galleries that had spent years trying to draw Gen Z audiences suddenly had them, and Korean curators were doing the inviting. That is the move HYBE actually paid for. The art was real, the artists were real, and the audience that K-pop sent into those rooms looked nothing like the one the rooms were used to.
The bigger picture
CONNECT, BTS was the moment K-pop stopped asking high culture for permission and started writing the checks. The shows ended by March 2020, COVID closed everything else, and the official site quietly archived. But the legacy is still being paid off. RM's collecting profile, BLACKPINK's Lisa attending Frieze Seoul, idols in Yun Hyong-keun T-shirts, the Korea Art Market Power 20 reads K-pop names now. It started here, with a virtual forest in Kensington Gardens and 18 kilometres of aluminum looping over the East River.
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