By Jeanne Ten Leu-Jiun
Singaporean contemporary artist and former Red Dot United (RDU) candidate Ben Puah opened his new exhibition, Stories That Do Not Fit the Frame, on the evening of 20 November 2025 at the RDU office, welcoming a small gathering of friends and guests.
Set within this cozy and intimate space, the 15 paintings immediately captivated viewers with their phantasmagorical scenes and restless symbols rendered in multiple layers of colours.
The enigmatic quality of paintings invited viewers to step beyond the edges of the canvas to complete the emotional connection.
Ben wears multiple hats, most recently as RDU candidate for Jurong East-Bukit Batok GRC in GE2025, though he is foremost recognised as a contemporary artist – often donning a flat cap or a sports cap.
Ben’s influences arise less from specific artists than from lived experience.
Conversations, memories, small everyday moments, and the small acts of kindness and struggle he observes, particularly within the structured yet tension-laden society of Singapore, slip into his work.
Ben’s approach to art took a definite direction when he “became more aware of the gaps between what is shown publicly and what people actually experience privately – the small contradictions, silences, and unspoken struggles.”
Ben explains: “Seeing how much goes unsaid, or gets simplified, made me want to pay attention to the things that don’t fit neatly into a narrative. That shift made me realise that art can hold complexity without needing to resolve it, and that has shaped the way I approach my work ever since.”
A versatile creator, Ben works across painting, sculpture, performance art, photography, and other media.
His creative process is intuitive and reflective.
He observes, sketches, experiments in layers, and allows the work to evolve naturally, letting unexpected elements shape the final piece.
His art consistently interrogates identity, power, and contradiction, inviting viewers to reconsider human experience and social frameworks.
Recognised early with the President’s Young Talents Award in 2001, Ben has since exhibited internationally in Australia, Germany, Japan, the USA, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, London, Malaysia, China, and Iran.
Ben Puah, A Meeting in the Forest, 2021, mixed media on felt
A Meeting in the Forest, 2021, immerses viewers in the metaphorical landscape of the artist’s mind as Ben navigates the uncertainties of a “recovering” world, grappling with news of armed conflicts in the midst of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
This Symbolist-inspired painting derives its moody intensity from various shades of blue.
For Ben, blue is a complex colour signifying both a rare occurrence of calm and “the blues” – pointing to the helplessness and dread experienced in a disturbing era of chaos.
Within this phantasmatic forest, lurk beasts and various grimacing human faces, visually manifesting external threats and internal anxieties.
Further intensifying the unsettling mood is a double-headed serpent, an ancient symbol of duality and danger, with one end sprouting a human face, suggesting that the source of chaos is intrinsically linked to humanity itself.
For Ben, this forest is also a “family,” which accommodates differences and diversity. This painting powerfully captures the universal, nuanced psychological manifestations of the human condition.
Ben Puah, When We are Together, 2022, acrylic on canvas
The 2022 painting, When We are Together, presents distinctive figures linked hand-in-hand in a simple circle.
Executed in a sombre greyscale palette, the restricted colours convey a gloomy, night-time atmosphere, symbolising the vast, enveloping external unknown.
The unbroken physical connection, set starkly against a canvas of grey, immediately establishes the central theme: survival through life’s challenges is found through connection, not isolation.
Symbolically, the work illustrates communal resilience through mutual support and strength in unity.
The figures maintain their individual identities while forming, what Ben refers to as a “living architecture of resilience.”
Here, unity is not uniformity; it is a conscious act of coming together despite differences.
Ultimately, the painting suggests that resilience in the face of uncertainties, be they global crises or local struggles, emerges from the collective strength of standing together as one.
Looking at the inner world that these paintings unleash, an inevitable question arises: isn’t it a contradiction that someone like Ben, an artist steeped in symbolist sensibilities and fiercely independent in spirit, a creator who explores an inner world, would eventually step onto the public stage of politics.
Ben sees this as the most natural evolution.
For years, Ben’s art has inhabited a realm where the real and the imagined collide, where symbols speak truths revealed through layers of emotion and imagery.
This sensitivity to the human condition and the attunement to what lies beneath the surface, is precisely what propelled him into political life, to represent the most common and overlooked concerns.
The observations that fuel his art – the tensions between what is shown and what is felt – demanded another form of expression.
In stepping from the studio into the public arena, he is merely extending his lifelong project of illuminating the unseen, questioning the given, and giving voice to the stories that rarely fit the frame.
Stories That Do Not Fit the Frame will run till 30 November 2025 at Red Dot United Office, WCEGA Tower, 21 Bukit Batok Crescent, #09-81. Viewing is by appointment only during the exhibition period. To schedule a visit, contact Eddy Tan at 88064365.
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