During her tenure, Ooi made significant contributions to the fair, elevating its status and establishing it as a premier platform for contemporary art in the region. Here, she looks back on what she calls ‘the ride of her life’
I grew up in rural Malaysia. My father worked as a plantation manager. We moved around a lot and I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Mum was sort of artistic. She crocheted, knitted and cross-stitched. I went to school in Singapore at the age of 13. My father always said that if he didn’t send me away, I’d never get a proper education because I’d be a jungle kid [laughs].
Somewhere in my late teens, I realised I was not really cut out for a nine-to-five job. Growing up in a traditional Chinese family, it was easy to make your family proud if you became a doctor, accountant or lawyer. I knew it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t work in a cubicle. I gravitated towards the arts a lot. I was crazy about musicals and I found a lot of joy in them. Les Misérables changed my life.
When it was time to go to school, in the late 1990s, I enrolled at Central Saint Martins [in London] without telling my family [Ooi later graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the school]. My father had passed away and my mum was beyond pissed off at me. She didn’t want to pay for me to go to school in the UK, [only] for me to “come out unemployed” [laughs]. There was very little known about the art world then. If my father had been around, maybe I wouldn’t have gone on this path. My dad was strict, and I was daddy’s little girl, to some extent. I’ve always asked myself: what would have happened if my dad had been alive? Who would I have become?
My first job was an internship in the UK, at the age of 22, with Sunil Gupta. It was in my second year of college. He’s best known as a photographer, but he was also a curator at the time. The internship had a lot of Ikea runs and sorting slides for presentations, but it opened my eyes to newer artists. I was very interested in postcolonialist art [Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong’s interpretation of the post-colonial theme in his art had a major impact on Ooi, who assisted him during her formative years in London], but at the time, it was YBA and more YBA [the provocative and influential Young British Artist movement in London in the late 1980s and early 1990s]. Gupta exposed me to artists from around the world. I finally felt like I found my thing.
After college, I was emotionally blackmailed to come home to Malaysia, and I did. I thought that it was the right thing to do, to just be in Kuala Lumpur and stay with my mum [after her father died]. [Moving back to Malaysia] was very challenging because I knew nothing about the art scene in Malaysia. I was very fortunate to have people open doors for me and point me in the right direction.
