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”. In this work, the bands of purple and green at the lower half of the painting mark the divide between a sacred and an earthly realm, which is represented by the warm colours. In the background, a white ‘aura’ over greyish blue emits an ambience of holiness linked to the subject, the tabernacle.
