Born in 1936, Thomas Yeo graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1960. He then studied in Chelsea School of Art and Hammersmith College of Art and Architecture in London. Since then, Yeo has participated in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions and in 1984, he was awarded the Cultural Medallion. From the mid-1970s onwards, Yeo began to adopt the use of collage in greater depth and he often incorporated different varieties of rice paper in one work. Collage was, in his words, “a liberation from the tyranny of the brush”. Nonetheless, he would frequently paint over the torn pieces of paper to achieve a more unified look, as he has done here. Collage allowed him to continue his interest in abstraction, while finding new ways of depicting pictorial space, and to explore the relationship between formal qualities like plane and ground. In Configuration on White I, Yeo has emphasised the work’s flatness, and the central composition appears like an isle, bound in by a sea of white.
