@rkive posted on IG Story the facade of the building where the APEC CEO Summit is held. This is today, October 29, 2025. @rkive, RM, Kpop Idol, Kim Namjoon of BTS, our Leader Nim will deliver a keynote speech. As he stands before the world’s business and political elite at the APEC CEO Summit in Korea, I reflect on the importance and significance of this moment, for South Korea and its management of the arts as an economic force, for countries in Asia that has a history of colonization and imperial influence, and for ARMY a diverse fandom who can approach this milestone with nuance.
At first glance, this might look like another victory for K-culture, another proof that Korean creativity has “made it” into the halls of power. But if we pause and listen with the ears of those who know his story, and the story of Bangtan, we might hear something more radical humming beneath the polite applause and our enormous pride as ARMY.
RM’s presence at APEC unsettles the very logic that built such summits. APEC is a space born of global capitalism and postcolonial hierarchies, where nations compete to sell, to produce, to consume. And here stands an artist whose body of work has long questioned those same systems; an artist who insists that the self is not just a brand, that creativity is not only a just commodity, that love and integrity are forms of resistance.
Through his words and his art, RM redefines what it means to lead, to represent, to succeed. He enters this space not to reinforce empire, but to remind it of its humanity. His talk on “Cultural and Creative Industries in the APEC Region and the Soft Power of K-Culture” invites us to rethink: What if power is not in the market, but in meaning? What if the truest form of growth is not economic, but ethical, relational, and imaginative?
For some of us, ARMYs, those who came to care and to think through their music, this moment is not simply pride in seeing “one of ours” on a global stage. It’s an act of reclamation. RM’s participation gestures toward a decolonial imagination, where artists from the once-colonized world speak not as cultural exports, but as equals shaping discourse, redefining value, and unsettling the West’s monopoly on modernity.
In a summit of CEOs and ministers, RM represents something that cannot be quantified: a people’s longing to be seen and to create freely, beyond the binaries of consumer and producer, colonizer and colonized. He stands not as the product of a system, but as its quiet critique. This is proof that art can inhabit power without surrendering its soul.
And maybe that’s why we, the ARMY who read between the lyrics, are moved. Because in that brief moment on the APEC stage, the story of Bangtan, our seven boys who turned their wounds into wonder, becomes the story of all of us still learning to sing beyond empire. Apobangpo! Purple and true!
I can’t help but smile at the juxtaposition of Basquiat’s crowned dinosaur appearing beside Namjoon as he talks about art in a Samsung Art TV feature. The image feels serendipitous! Basquiat’s bold creature of selfhood meeting BTS’s message of self-love. Both carry that same beat: the courage to be raw, to be seen, to be yourself, even when the world insists otherwise.
Interestingly, Maya Angelou’s poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” was published as a picture book with Basquiat’s art. Her fearless verses wrapped in his fierce lines and bold colors. Angelou’s voice, like Namjoon’s, speaks of resilience; Basquiat’s brush, like BTS’s music, insists that vulnerability is power.
Namjoon, BTS, Maya Angelou, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — what a combination! Radical. Revolutionary. And utterly romantic in their shared belief that to live artfully is to live bravely.
Life Doesn't Frighten Me By Maya Angelou
Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at all
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn't frighten me at all
Mean old Mother Goose
Lions on the loose
They don't frighten me at all
Dragons breathing flame
On my counterpane
That doesn't frighten me at all.
I go boo
Make them shoo
I make fun
Way they run
I won't cry
So they fly
I just smile
They go wild
Life doesn't frighten me at all.
Tough guys fight
All alone at night
Life doesn't frighten me at all.
Panthers in the park
Strangers in the dark
No, they don't frighten me at all.
That new classroom where
Boys all pull my hair
(Kissy little girls
With their hair in curls)
They don't frighten me at all.
Don't show me frogs and snakes
And listen for my scream,
If I'm afraid at all
It's only in my dreams.
I've got a magic charm
That I keep up my sleeve
I can walk the ocean floor
And never have to breathe.
Life doesn't frighten me at all
Not at all
Not at all.
Life doesn't frighten me at all.
© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
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