Paw Thame, Win Pe, Kin Maung Yin and Bagyi Aung Soe were friends at the Peacock Gallery exchanging modernist ideas and concepts, alternatively supporting one another and locked in rivalry.

[2][3] Paw Thame was largely self-taught although as a young man he spent much time in the studios of Aung Khin and Kin Maung (Bank).

Paw Thame would watch Aung Khin paint, learning about the technique, the process and the lifestyle of an artist.

[4] Soon, Win Pe heard about Paw Thame, actively giving him support, art materials and access to his studio.

[4] In 1975, Paw Thame founded Peacock Gallery, the first gallery to be entirely devoted to modern art and a space combining his love for horticulture and art, where some of Rangoon's most avant-garde artists like Bagyi Aung Soe (1924-1990), Win Pe (1936-), Kin Maung Yin (1938-) and Sonny Nyein (1949-) gathered to spar and to show their works.

[6] During the 1960s in Mandalay, when Paw Thame was on the threshold of modern art and reading voraciously, he was most impressed by Win Pe's designs and compositions and the graphic quality of Kin Maung (Bank)'s works: solid colors, flat planes and clean lines.

Into the 1970s in Rangoon, Paw Thame continued to display a marked penchant for the simplification of form into geometric shapes that harks back to Cézanne's premise to ‘treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone'.

Yin Ker states that "Paw Thame's revelations echo aspects of Giorgio Vasari's biographies, Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times.

This account is an indispensable perspective of the story of the development of modernism in Burma and a substantial contribution to Burmese art history".