Robert Rauschenberg was considered a risk-taking, experimental artist in 1960s New York, so he must have seemed like an alien when he travelled in the 1980s to Mainland China, which had only just begun opening its doors to the West.
Yet Rauschenberg was not rejected by China—he was embraced by it. In 1985, he was given permission to host his “ROCI China” exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, making him the first Western contemporary artist to have a solo show in the country after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
More than 300,000 people visited the exhibition, awed by Rauschenberg’s boundary-pushing paintings, prints, sculptures and installations, which could not have been more different to the Soviet-style realist art that dominated in China at the time.
Before a new exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s Vydock series opens at Pace Gallery in Hong Kong, we investigate how Rauschenberg inspired five internationally-acclaimed Chinese artists—some of whom attended the groundbreaking “ROCI China” exhibition when they were children.