Gan Chin Lee's Invasion and Resistance represents a pivotal shift in his artistic exploration - a moment where material, history, and identity coalesce into a critique of Eurocentric artistic dominance. The nine carved wooden panels, gilded with gold lacquer, draw on Vietnamese lacquer practices and Chinese plaque-making traditions. Through this return to Asian craftsmanship, Gan reopens questions about lineage, be-longing, and the politics of artistic formation in a Malaysian context. The compositional centrepiece, a four-panel relief depicting figures struggling aboard a wooden boat amid ferocious waves, reveals the density of Gan's intellectual and visual references. The carved surface transforms the traditionally painterly into something resistant, tactile, and irrevocable. Unlike oil paint, which allows correction and concealment, carved wood refuses revision. Each incision becomes a mark of commitment. This materiality mirrors identity as layered, scarred, shaped by forces that cannot be simply painted over. Gan's references to art historical "mas-ters are intentionally unruly. Fragmented figures evoke Goya's tumultuous human conditions, Velázquez's spatial intelli-gence, Degas's psychological melancholy, Courbet's corporeality, Kollwitz's emotional intensity, and Liu Xiaodong's contemporary realism. Yet these Western images are destabilised through an Asian formal vocabulary - most notably in the wave forms rendered in the manner of Hokusai. Such intercultural visual entanglement reflects the complexity of Southeast Asian artistic heritage, where global and local narratives intersect, overlap, and contest one another. This entanglement is distinguishable through Gan's biography. Born in Jenjarom, aChinese-majority New Village in Selangor, Gan's artistic training took him from illustration studies in Malaysia to advanced mural painting and an MAin Fine Art at the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing. Although geographically distant from the Euro-American art centres, both Malaysia and China's art academies continue to uphold Western-derived principles, Gan's mid-career reflection therefore confronts a fundamental question: How does one articulate a Southeast Asian artistic identity while shaped by pedagogical structures that privilege Western art history? An archival photograph of painter Low Kwang Soo helped activate these reflec-tions. In the image, Low stands in Western clothing in a traditional wooden kampung studio, while surrounded by oil paintings. The juxtaposition between Western me-dium, modern attire, and the vernacular studio environment encapsulates what Philipp Stockhammer describes as "cultural entanglement"— a process where cultures shape each other reciprocally rather than hierarchically. Gan reads the photograph not as evidence of assimilation but of nego-tiation, tension, and hybridity - a condition foundational to Malaysian modern art. Wood, as Gan's chosen material, functions as both inheritance and critique. Chinese ancestral plaques, surname boards, and tanghao (hall names) historically articulated familial belonging through place-based identifiers, often tied to regions in China.2 In diasporic contexts like Malaysia, these objects became anchors of memory, mapping migratory histories and sustaining a sense of community beyond nation-state boundaries. This genealogy intersects with the political history of Jenjarom itself. Established as part of the British Briggs Plan in the early 1950s, the New Villages were designed to surveil and control Chinese rural populations during the Malayan Emergency. The village structure, there-fore, was never neutral - it was born from colonial spatial engineering. Gan's decision to house Invasion and Resistance within a reconstructed wooden dwelling invokes this layered history. The house bereft itself a nostalgic motif but a spatial critique: a reminder of structural containment, cultural resilience, and the formation of diasporic subjectivity under coercive conditions. Gan's technique of carving Western masterpieces into wood extends this critique into the realm of material decolo-nisation. Rather than reproducing Goya's or Courbet's compositions, he shifts their meaning by re-mediating them through woodcut- a method historically aligned with mass education, resistance, and political awakening. This echoes Lu Xun's advocacy for the woodcut movement in early 20th-century China, where he saw the medium as a tool for social enlightenment and anti-oppression." By activating this lineage, Gan transposes Western canonical images into a framework of Asian political and material agency. By this logic, Invasion and Resistance is a self-portrait - not through resemblance but through methodology. The boat tossed on waves symbolises the artist navigating competing histories. The figures, drawn from both Western and Eastern imagery, embody hybridised subjectivities. The waves, rendered in Hokusai's style, symbolise the cultural currents that buffet and shape the artist's position. Carving becomes both resistance and affirmation: a refusal to accept inherited narratives without question. The nine panels, installed within a reconstructed wooden house, articulate identity through material, memory, and place. The house grounds the viewer in the vernacular world of Gan's upbringing - a world shaped by diaspora, colonial planning, and community resilience. The wooden structures echo the carved panels, reinforcing the idea that identity, like wood, retains every mark pressed into its surface. Ultimately, Invasion and Resistance embodies a decolonial sensibility that neither rejects Western art nor romanticises Asian tradition. Instead, Gan proposes a third space - a carved space - where negotiation, hybridity, and reinterpretation become tools of emancipation. His work invites viewers to consider how identity is formed through the interplay of influence and resistance, inheritance and invention. Through this material and conceptual labour, Gan asserts an artistic agency grounded in place, sharpened by history, and carved with deliberate persistence. 1. Philipp W. Stockhammer, ed., Conceptualizing Cultural Hybridization: A Transdisciplinary Approach (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 1-18 2. Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 284. 3. T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridae University Press, 19991,199 4. Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 27-45