Art World
Check Out K-Pop Sensation BTS’s Heartfelt Contribution to Supercurator Hans Ulrich Obrists’s Most Ambitious Art Project
The K-pop stars have joined Virgil Abloh, Rachel Rose, Judy Chicago, and others in participating in the project.
The K-pop stars have joined Virgil Abloh, Rachel Rose, Judy Chicago, and others in participating in the project.
Artnet News ShareShare This Article
One of the world’s most famous K-pop bands has contributed to one of the world’s longest-running art projects.
BTS, the South Korean boy band, is the latest participant in curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s ongoing initiative do it, which invites creative luminaries to put forth simple instructions for creating an artwork.
The band’s submission is part of the project’s latest chapter, do it (around the world), which brings archival and brand-new instructions together on a dedicated website powered by Google Arts & Culture.
New do its are updated weekly and, with an eye toward the current moment, are all designed to be completed at home. Other recent participants include designer Virgil Abloh (“How to pickpocket the establishment: Read the Black Canon. / Understand the nature of man. / Prototype, release, and repeat”), artist and writer Aria Dean (“end the world”), and artist Judy Chicago (“make a mark / express a feeling / send it to a friend”).
BTS’s heartfelt contribution, penned in English and Korean, is as follows:
Connect one dot with another
Draw a line, create a plane.
Beyond the boundaries of time and space,
“You” and “I” become “We”.
Our future is a beautiful image.
This isn’t the first time BTS has waded into the art world. In January, the group teamed up with the Serpentine, where Obrist serves as artistic director, to launch “CONNECT, BTS,” a major series of public-art commissions featuring work by 22 artists in New York, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Seoul.
Obrist first conceived do it back in 1993 with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. Since then, more than 400 artists have contributed recipes for artworks, including Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois, Adrian Piper, Tracey Emin, and Félix González-Torres.
The idea for the latest iteration, do it (around the world), began in March 2020 as a way to occupy and delight people quarantined around the world.