oil on canvas
200 x 200 cm, unframed
“[The] Rashomon Series is a continuous narrative between the different works not unlike the movie itself where each character tells his own s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ truth.”
The Akira Kurosawa movie Rashomon (1950) explores the subjective nature of the concept of “truth”, especially when accounts of reality are necessarily filtered through human experience. In the above quote from Teng Nee Cheong’s personal diaries on his Rashomon Series, “story” is decisively struck out and replaced with “truth”— this embrace of the validity of multiple truths experienced by different individuals forms the emotional cornerstone for the series.
The male form in Rashomon – Before Whose Might Mortals Bow V is abstracted far beyond the first four works in the series, transformed into a hazy mist with dainty firefly-like points of light around his feet. The muscular silhouette mirrors the form of the butterfly columns in the background of the piece, suggesting at the delicate fragility underlying outward appearances of masculine strength.
This work is part of Teng’s wider Tattoo series, where his depictions of tattooed nudes often in sensual, intimate settings explore the intricacies of relationships that individuals have with each other, and with larger society. Not only do tattoos hold stigmatised associations in East Asia, opening up discussion for alienation, Teng’s renderings of tattooed figures provoke ruminations of the image within an image.
Notably, the figure in this painting is contained within a starkly delineated rectangular border not seen in previous works in the series that suggests at the culmination of Teng’s concept for this series: ontological levels blend as the blurring of the male silhouette seemingly liberates the tattooed tiger, while the rectangle—akin to the boundaries of a canvas— suggest that our self-conceptions of identity are not unlike fictions contained within a canvas.
Provenance: From the estate of the artist
