JENNY Kee pushes her trademark red, cat's-eye spectacles up her nose, casts a glance around the dazzlingly bright fabrics, knitwear, paintings, rugs, watches, placemats, even picture frames that cover every surface of her shop in Sydney's Strand Arcade and announces: 'I'm all for interbreeding.
'It creates much more unusual and exciting people. I think my work is vibrant and strong and it's got to do with my background.
'It's no accident that I'm half Chinese, a quarter Anglo-Saxon and a quarter Italian. That is what Australia is going to become. Read the statistics on the year 2020 - we are going to be that sort of mix. I am symbolically an example of what Australia will be.' Kee, whose late Chinese-Australian father's family came from Guangdong during Australia's gold-mining era, grew up in Sydney's Bondi Junction, a place she says 'reeked of racism and white RSL [Returned Services League] clubs. These days it's full of noodle shops and funky Japanese kids. It's great to see that happening. I used to loathe it'.
But still it's only 15 years since Kee, 48, was kicked out of the RSL club there and told: 'We don't want your sort here.' It was racism of that kind that drove her to become one of Australia's most successful artists and designers.
'I was going to show them. It was that driving me, that made me so strong,' she says.
Kee's distinctive looks - those spectacles and the red lipstick that is part of her affinity with the waratah, the New South Wales state flower that rejuvenates after bushfires - are known Australia-wide and she has incorporated her face into her new logo.