Gan Chin Lee is a Malaysian artist of Chinese descent known across Southeast Asia for his realist paintings that painstakingly register the ethnic and religious complexities of Malaysia. The compositions of his works often employ an amplified spatial perspective in which he depicts multiracial and multicultural urban scenes in shared social spaces, such as street food stalls and coffee shops that are densely populated by characters indifferent to each other. There is usually a sequential narrative in his work, as he plays with temporality through polyptych and panoramic viewpoints. Urban angst, restlessness, and working class hardship are captured and hyperbolized in his enigmatic and disorientating canvases. His family’s linage as Chinese immigrants, and migratory waves of South Asian Muslim diaspora have been recurring subjects inthe artist’s work. Chin Lee’s visual vocabulary highlights mundane subjects and characters from real life with an absurdist approach. His self-anthropological gaze to the kaleidoscopic social tissue of Malaysian society turns his image-making practice into a living archive, a witness to historical processes.