Hong Kong, (EFE).
M+, the flagship museum of contemporary visual culture in Asia, on Saturday opened “Robert Rauschenberg and Asia,” the first monographic exhibition fully dedicated to tracing the work the American artist (1925–2008) created during —and inspired by— his travels across Asia between 1964 and 1990.
Curated as part of the museum’s Pao-Watari series, which spotlights key figures and episodes in contemporary Asian art, and aligned with global centennial celebrations of Rauschenberg’s birth, the exhibition brings together more than 40 works by the inventor of the Combine.
It also includes pieces by Asian artists who knew him personally, highlighting enduring, two-way artistic dialogues.
The show will run through Apr. 26, 2026, in the Cissy Pui-Lai Pao and Shinichiro Watari galleries.
Rauschenberg —a pivotal 20th-century figure who erased boundaries between found objects, silkscreens and craft techniques— developed a long, transformative relationship with Asia.
His first major engagement with the region came in 1964, when he traveled as costume and set designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s world tour.
In Tokyo, he staged his own performances and created works using local materials, drawing both admiration and controversy.
Art historian Hiroko Ikegami, whose scholarship is the main historical source for these early episodes, has written that Rauschenberg’s appearances in Japan should not be read as Cold War–era U.S. cultural propaganda. Instead, she argues they were reciprocal encounters in which Asian communities, navigating rapid Americanization, sought artistic self-definition while forming transnational networks that anticipated today’s global art world.
The exhibition is organized into two main sections. The first revisits those seminal encounters: the celebrated 1964 Tokyo performance; the Unions (1975) and Jammers (1975–76) series created at the Gandhi ashram in Ahmedabad; and the Japanese Recreational Clayworks (1982–85) from Shigaraki.
The second section focuses on the Asian chapters of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (1984–91), the artist’s self-funded project that championed peace through cultural exchange amid late–Cold War tensions.
Although some local critics at the time accused ROCI of cultural interference or “aesthetic colonialism,” the project profoundly shaped later generations of Asian artists.
Chinese artists Xu Bing, Wang Guangyi, Qiu Zhijie, Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang have all publicly said Rauschenberg’s 1980s visit marked a turning point — legitimizing hybrid forms, social critique and experimental openness in a still-restrictive environment, and influencing the trajectory of contemporary Chinese art.
The exhibition also features archival footage, photographs and extensive documentation that, according to M+, underscore that “before the art world became global, Rauschenberg was already looking East.”
In Hong Kong, the show resonates strongly within a globally oriented museum revisiting the work of an artist who championed intercultural dialogue as an antidote to ideological blocs and censorship.
