Lim Yew Kuan (b. 1928) is one of the prominent Singapore’s second-generation artists, who emerged in the local art scene in the 1950s. His father Lim Hak Tai was the founding principle of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Lim graduated from the Academy in 1950 and later joined the Equator Art Society as one of its funding members and the first president in 1956. During the period from 1958 to 1962, he was pursuing further study at Chelsea School of Art in London, UK. From 1964 to 1979, Lim served as the second principle of the Nanyang Academy and later continued to teach there until his retirement in 1994. In the year 2011, Lim Yew Kuan received the Cultural Medallion from Singapore government. Against an interior background, the portrait is featured with a high contrast of dark and lightness, suggesting a strong emotional implication of the subject which is the artist himself. The work was created in 1966, for the first woodcut exhibition, one of the first Singapore art exhibitions to take place after the country's independence.
