Uncle Black (Pak Hitam) belongs to Zulkifli Yusoff’s Malaya Series (2007–2009), where history, folklore and pop idioms converge in canvases that probe Malaysia’s colonial legacy and post-independence identity. Here, he does not merely illustrate the past but reassembles it, drawing on proverbs, archival references, and cultural icons to expose how national memory is both preserved and distorted. The titular “Pak Hitam” becomes a cipher for forgotten figures, framed within a dense visual language of collage, text and flat colour. The Malaya Series marked a shift from Yusoff’s raw, gestural 1990s critiques of Reformasi-era politics toward a more research-based, historically inflected practice. By using silkscreen-like graphics and Pop-inflected hues, he renders serious episodes such as colonial resistance or cultural myth in a vocabulary closer to comic strips than textbooks. That tension is deliberate: the works balance humour with critique, nostalgia with unease. Seen within his wider oeuvre from Penceramah (1999) to the Rukunegara works (2012), Uncle Black (Pak Hitam) epitomises Yusoff’s role as cultural storyteller and skeptic. The canvas invites viewers not to accept history at face value but to recognise how the past continues to shape Malaysia’s contested present.