By Jessica Lack

It rained the day Robert Rauschenberg reduced painting to a car tire track. In 1953, the artist was broke and renting an unheated studio on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, New York. Unable to afford materials, he scavenged typewriter paper and pasted it together to create an almost 7-meter roll, which he laid on the street outside. The composer John Cage then drove his Ford Model A through black paint and along the paper’s length. It took the pair some time to peel the wet paper off the pavement, but when it had dried, Rauschenberg hung it on the wall in the form of a Chinese scroll and titled it Automobile Tire Print (1953). ‘Nobody ever got more out of a Model A than that,’ he said of the gesture, which, with its tacky residue, mapped the vehicle’s passage through space and time and offered a pitch-level view of the urban landscape.

‘I think a painting is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world,’ he later famously said. This sense of ‘real world’ art was rooted in the artist’s childhood, spent on the Texas coast. Born in 1925 in the oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Rauschenberg grew up in the shadow of fossil fuel distillation and learnt to appreciate the raw beauty of this corrosive landscape, later incorporating its grime and rust into his ‘Combines’ (1954–64) – seemingly chaotic structures created from newspaper print, paint, and scavenged items that echoed the detritus of the urban and industrial environment.

With Cage, he found a shared belief in the everyday: The composer thought all sounds were music and Rauschenberg held that all materials could be art. In many respects, they were each other’s double. They met in 1951 and were, in Rauschenberg’s words, ‘soul mates right from the very beginning.’ Thirteen years his senior, Cage was a brilliant, mercurial composer in search of a chance-born, substanceless music. A keen follower of Zen Buddhism and the ancient Chinese manual I Ching, which he used to determine his compositions, he considered Rauschenberg as ‘naturally zen’ in his desire to blur the gap between art and life.

By the late 1950s, the artist had become a chronicler of America’s petrol-powered optimism, a poet of asphalt and grit, dragging junk off the street and into the pristine confines of the gallery. Years later he inverted this impulse by taking art back into the world. In 1986 he converted a BMW 635 CSi into a ‘drivable museum.’ The surface of the car was printed with images of antiquities and works by Bronzino and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art collection interspersed with photographs by Rauschenberg himself and released into the urban landscape, where it competed with the visual chaos – everything from advertising billboards to the bubble-gum pink of the video-rental store and the 7-Eleven. Rauschenberg’s BMW Art Car will make its Asian debut at Art Basel Hong Kong this year, something the executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Courtney J. Martin, says ‘provides yet another reminder of Rauschenberg’s unconventional artistic practice. Like so much of his oeuvre, [this work] blurs the boundaries between art and life, painting and sculpture, art and technology.’

The trip initiated a lifelong fascination with the region, currently the subject of ‘Rauschenberg and Asia’ at M+ in Hong Kong, staged to mark the centenary of the artist’s birth. The museum’s senior curator and associate director of curatorial affairs, Russell Storer, notes that ‘it holds special meaning for us to map Robert Rauschenberg’s travels across Asia through this exhibition. His encounters with Asian artisanal traditions and cultural contexts left a lasting imprint on his own practice while opening up new possibilities for contemporary art.’

The show reveals the artist’s free-flowing brilliance and restless desire for knowledge over a 16-year period between 1974 and 1990. Rauschenberg journeyed across Asia learning the secrets of ceramic painting with the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company in Shigaraki in Japan, collaborating with papermakers at the world’s oldest-known paper mill in Jingxian in Anhui Province, China, and at the Gandhi ashram in Ahmedabad, India. There he also witnessed and collected lusciously colored sari silks, which inspired his floating ‘Jammers’ (1975–76), draped like prayer flags across gallery walls.

In 1964, the same year the artist won the grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, becoming the first American to do so, he travelled with Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to India, Thailand, and Japan. Rauschenberg’s sets and costumes for the company, made in collaboration with local artists, were, he said, ‘an awkward but beautiful addition to my work.’

Such encounters led to the artist’s most ambitious self-funded initiative, the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), developed between 1984 and 1991. This utopian program of touring exhibitions and cultural exchanges was designed to promote dialogue and world peace. As a child of the Dust Bowl generation who came of age during the Cold War, Rauschenberg developed a profound suspicion of absolutes and a deep skepticism of ideology. In his formative years as a student and young artist at the freewheeling, Bauhaus-infused Black Mountain College in North Carolina, with its emphasis on collaboration and impermanence, the artist had found a way to navigate this uncertain and polarized world. Now he wanted to extend this strategy across the globe.

‘Rauschenberg and Asia’ revisits ROCI at a moment of renewed geopolitical tension, offering a timely reminder of the power of cultural diplomacy. Rauschenberg fervently believed that his ‘American energy’ mixed with ‘each country’s reality’ could create something incandescently wonderful, and it often did. In 1985, ROCI in China was the first Western contemporary art exhibition in the country since the Cultural Revolution and, when the critic Li Xianting reflected on this moment more than two decades later, he described how it sent shock waves across the nation, making ‘Chinese artists’ brows sweat as they tried to figure out what Rauschenberg was doing.’

That faith in the power of culture to bridge divides sustained the artist until his death in 2008. Rauschenberg spent a lifetime dissolving the borders between art and life – and, more ambitiously, between nations and ideologies. What began as a rain-soaked experiment on the streets of Manhattan grew into a global project: to trace a line of connection across the world.