009

Here, Raja Shahriman’s steel figure sculpture with a keris in hand emerges from the flat painted plywood surface mounted on a framed board. As always, Raja Shahriman’s fight is not against some adversaries but the demon within himself; his desires, his lust and his fears. In the catalogue of Gerak Tempur (Battle Moves) where this work originated from, Tengku Eli Aziddin wrote that this was “typical of his identity, yet there is something different. These works although touching on a violent subject-matter, seem soft and gentle in their movements”.

Raja Shahriman broke the gentility or kehalusan of the Malay psyche when he presented his Killing Tools steel works to the public in the exhibition, War Box, Lalang and Killing Tools in 1996. The stark aggression in those works was toned down by the time of his Nafas (Breath) exhibition. Calling himself a ‘blacksmith’, Raja Shahriman graduated from the Mara Institute of Technology in 1990 and taught at the Malaysian Institute of Art. In 1992, he won the Minor Award at Salon Malaysia. His monumental metal sculpture, Growth With Equity, stands in Taman Wawasan on Jalan Sultan Sulaiman in Kuala Lumpur.