Robert Rauschenberg and Asia

'Merantau' & Its Frictions: Dialogues with Rauschenberg, ROCI, and Malaysia

This series of programmes positions Robert Rauschenberg's ROCI MALAYSIA (1990) exhibition as a historical catalyst for an open dialogue. Using the regional lens of merantau (mobility, transformation, and cross-cultural encounter), these programmes create a live conversation between Rauschenberg's archival legacy and contemporary Malaysian practitioners exploring images, material waste, sound, and space.

June

Curatorial Walkthrough

with Russell Storer

Sunday, 14 June 2026, 2.30pm (Level 5)

Join us as we walk through the Robert Rauschenberg and Asia exhibition with Russell Storer, Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, M+. Free entry.

Please note that this event is fully subscribed.

July

The Material Combine: Sifting Image Saturation

Workshop facilitated by Azam Aris (Chetak 17) and Sanan Anuar (Studio Bogus)

Saturday, 11 July, 2.00PM - 5.00PM. Walk-ins welcome.

A silkscreen workshop inspired by Rauschenberg's foundational concept of the 'Combine' and his practice of silkscreening found media images directly onto alternative, everyday surfaces like tin-plated steel during his Malaysian tour. Fees to join: RM120. Email info@ilhamgallery.com to register.

Merantau of Meaning: Translation, Transfer, and the ROCI MALAYSIA Catalogue

Talk by Pauline Fan

Saturday, 18 July, 3.00PM

To merantau is to leave home with the expectation of return, changed by what is encountered along the way. Rooted in Minangkabau tradition, merantau has become part of the cultural sensibility of the Malay world, a way of thinking about movement, encounter, and transformation. Rauschenberg's decade-long ROCI project, which sought dialogue through art across continents, might be understood as a merantau of its own.

The 1990 ROCI Malaysia catalogue appears as a single publication in Malay. Yet it is the product of multiple acts of translation. Donald Saff's introduction and Robert Hughes's 1976 essay, both originally written in English, were translated into Malay to sit alongside Muhammad Haji Salleh's own writing. The work of translation is largely invisible, leaving little trace of the movement between languages.

This session uses the catalogue as a starting point for thinking about translation more broadly. What travels when meaning moves between languages? What is lost or gained in the process? Rauschenberg's own practice offers a parallel. His solvent-transfer technique carried images from one surface to another, altered in the process, while his choice to give certain works Malay titles, Yang Teragung and Hutan Belantara, suggests translation not simply as conversion, but as an act of making meaning in a new place.

Pauline Fan is a literary translator and Creative Director of PUSAKA.

August

Malady & Remedy: Orang Asli Art Engaging with Ecological Crises

Talk by Wendy Sia (Gerimis Art Project)

Saturday, 1 August, 3.00PM.

In 1970, Robert Rauschenberg designed the first Earth Day poster, featuring an American bald eagle at the centre of a collage of environmental decay. The composition symbolically positioned the United States at the heart of a global environmental crisis. Born and raised in a Texas oil town of Port Arthur, and eventually settling on the remote Floridian island of Captiva, the artist had witnessed the degradation of wetlands, decimating oil spills, and declination of bird populations.

Rauschenberg’s environmental artworks were responses to his witnessing and concerns, convinced that “art can encourage individual conscience.” It was his way of expression, lamentation, and call to action to the malady of humanity. In his lithograph print "Last Turn—Your Turn", he wrote, “Now is the only time we have. We need all of the existing living things to attempt with devout attention and dedication to if not reverse this certain death, to turn back into life.”

Of late, the malady of environmental and climate crises are increasingly felt by most of humanity, but for our Indigenous Orang Asli, it is an existential crisis as well. How are the Orang Asli artists and cultural custodians responding to disruptions of their ways of life, knowing, and being as their ancestral lands, forests, and waters are increasingly encroached? How can we witness together the ecological, material, spiritual, and cosmological disruptions and build solitary? This session presents the stories, practices, and responses of Orang Asli artists and cultural custodians through various artistic means, and how these reveal truths otherwise unspoken and unwritten.

Art as a catalyst for social change

Lecture by Jo Kukathas

Saturday 8 August, 3.00PM

What is the purpose of art in society? One of Rauchenberg's fundamental beliefs was that art should serve as a catalyst for social change. This lecture by acclaimed theatre practitioner Jo Kukathas aims to explore the role of art in the formation of a more humane and inclusive dialogue.

September

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism vs. The Global Art Jet

Talk by Dr. Sumit Mandal (Author of Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World)

Saturday, 12 September, 3.00PM

An exchange exploring two different forms of cosmopolitanism. This talk places Rauschenberg's vision of a structured, traveling global art exchange into a friendly dialogue with Dr. Mandal's extensive research on perantau (historical migrant) networks - such as Hadhrami, Bugis, and Minang traders - who created organic, unsponsored, ground-up cultural mixing across the Malay world.

An American Pragmatist: Robert Rauschenberg in Malaysia and Singapore

Lecture by Kathleen Ditzig

Saturday, 26 September, 3.00PM

The Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI)'s presentation in Malaysia in 1990 was not the first nor the first nor last presentation of Robert Rauschenberg's artwork in Southeast Asia. His work was presented in the region in travelling group exhibitions of American Art in the 1960s and 1970s, and was presented in Malaysia through the 1990s. In 1997, Kuala Lumpur-based TAKSU gallery and Singapore based Wetterling Teo Gallery collaborated on the presentations of a solo exhibition of the artist's work in Malaysia and Singapore. The press release described Rauschenberg as an "American Pragmatist." Focusing on the presentation of Rauschenberg's art in Malaysia and Singapore, this lecture traces the discursive framing of Rauchenberg as an "American Pragmatistic" in relation to the evolving local and international urgencies that defined the presentation of Americn art in Southeast Asia at the end of the Cold War.

Research for this lecture was enables by M+ Museum's Rauschenberg and Asia and a fellowship at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives in 2025.

Kathleen Ditzig (PhD) is a Singporean is a Singaporean curator and art historian whose work examines the infrastructure and geopoliticals of art worlds, and the legacies of the US Cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

The Migrant Teahouse by Dari Dapur

Saturday, 17 October, 3.00PM-5.00PM

Sunday, 18 October, 3.00PM-5.00PM

Connect over tea from six different communities, whose journeys across generations have shaped Malaysia's rich cultural landscapes.

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