Adeline Ooi – director Asia, Art Basel – spent her childhood in Malaysia, on palm oil estates managed by her father, where art was in short supply. In her early teens, she was sent to school in Singapore. A few years later, she had an image of herself working all day in an office cubicle under fluorescent lighting, and knew she would be unhappy. She wasn’t entirely clear what she wanted to do, but by the age of 18, she’d decided she should go to Central Saint Martins art school in London. “And I practically had to get disowned first, right?” she says, on a recent video call. “My parents were not happy. My mother was not happy. Typical Chinese family: ‘I’m paying university fees for you to go to school to get a job in a profession where I’m not entirely sure if you’re ever going to be able to make a living … Are you kidding me’?” Ooi laughs, which she does frequently. She also speaks a mile a minute. The art world’s fairs and galleries can spawn slightly alienating women with a high chill factor, but Ooi is not of that breed. There’s an initial problem with the video – isn’t there always? – and when she suddenly zooms into view, she’s clasping her head, gasping with the sort of pent-up, anguished relief that a lesser person might try to disguise. “The joys of working from home, right?” she says. This home is her mother’s, in Kuala Lumpur, where Ooi has spent many months in recent years being a carer. Her mother has dementia and knows nothing about how her daughter makes a living or the job she’s constantly juggling. This interview takes place a few days before Ooi will fly to Hong Kong, fulfil her week’s quarantine, then enter the run-up to Art Basel Hong Kong with its vernissage (private art viewings), exclusive passes and multimillion-dollar deals. Talking to her, knowing the unseen parental presence is close by, feels like a private viewing before she presents herself to the public. Ooi went to Central Saint Martins because “there was a little bit of a hippie person in me, a little love of fresh air”. But she felt lost in late-1990s London, where fourth-generation Malaysian-Chinese isn’t an easily graspable category and being congratulated on her English became a little tedious. “It was a very lonely time in the UK and you realise, ‘Gosh, you are so different from everybody else.’ For the longest time, I was trying to get away from Asia and for the first time, I felt I was longing for Asia.” Luckily, Central Saint Martins had a large library of international art-house videos she could rent. “And so that was the beginning of, you know, Adeline devouring Eat Drink Man Woman or Eat a Bowl of Tea or anything by Wong Kar-wai or Hou Hsiao-hsien or any Asian filmmaker because I just needed to be with my people and I can’t always be in Chinatown.” Happy Together at 25: Wong Kar-wai on his classic 1997 gay movie Did she manage to create art? “Yes. Very badly. I knew I never was going to survive as an artist. I was spending a lot of time in the black room …” She means the darkroom, as in photography, and corrects herself immediately with a wry grin. “I was going through a whole existential crisis in my early 20s.” Still, she was depressed returning to Malaysia after three years. “Because, again, it was emotional blackmail, right? My mother was, ‘I’m not getting any younger, your father’s dead, I don’t want to die alone, who’s going to come home and spend time with me?’ You know, the usual Chinese mum. So I was the dutiful daughter. I came home, dreading it. And then, out of the blue …” She stops, laughs. She likes to say “out of the blue” has been the theme of her life although the phrase suggests less personal agency – and ability – than is surely the case. “Out of the blue … I met people who, out of the blue, introduced me to other people and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s an entire cultural scene here.’ I didn’t grow up in the big city, I’d been at school in Singapore, I’d spent most of my life away from my homeland and so I had to rediscover everything.” At first, it was theatre that interested her; she enjoyed rehearsals, being involved backstage, helping with sets. Then she met Valentine Willie (“I thought, ‘Oh, there really is a man with that name’”) who has an art gallery in Kuala Lumpur dealing in Southeast Asian art. “He was very instrumental in showing me there is a region, and it has art histories and cultural overlaps and there are resonances that bind us together. And, again, that was a huge wow moment.” In 2000, she joined Valentine Willie Fine Art as a curator and from there she began her regional explorations. In 2001, she was awarded the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship for her proposal to study artist initiatives in Indonesia and the Philippines. The day she arrived in Yogyakarta, on the Indonesian island of Java, was September 11, 2001. Asked how that felt, her voice drops for a moment, uncharacteristically. “I was afraid. There was always this sort of misconception because it was Central Java and [Islamic terrorist group] Jemaah Islamiah was in Jogja [Yogyakarta]. And I’d always been led to believe, ‘Oh s***, this Chinese girl is going to get slaughtered’.” (In 1998, during the Asian financial crisis, rioters in Indonesia had targeted the Chinese community.) “But, in fact” – her tone perks up – “Jogja changed my life, too. It was the most open place I’d been, open in the way that people were accepting and embracing of your difference. No one kept asking me ‘Are you Chinese?’ ‘Are you Indian?’ or ‘You’re Chinese, how come you speak Malay?’, which is very Malaysian … And I was introduced to this big wide world, to influential figures like Mella [Jaarsma] and Nindityo [Adipurnomo]. They became like my mum and dad. I will tell you, I think in so many ways I grew up in parts of Southeast Asia over those years.” At Valentine Willie, she met Beverly Yong and Rachel Ng. In 2008, all three left to co-found RogueArt. “We decided we were not natural-born art dealers, we’d been selling art in our 20s, and we wanted to do something new. We knew we had more to give. It was, I suppose, a consultancy. Everyone was quite concerned for us – ‘How are you going to make a living, my dears?’ – telling us nobody pays for advice and at most you might just get a free lunch. Right. That was really the general response: good luck, dears.” She is tough but she is genuine and has high integrity and a passion and commitment to promote art in Asia Marcus Renfrew, founder Art HK In 2009, The Edge newspaper in Malaysia interviewed all three women, describing Ooi as “the free-spirited and most expressive one among them”. RogueArt was already organising exhibitions and talks, publishing books and working with corporations and the public sector to facilitate art projects. In the article, Ooi assessed her role as “knotting together pieces to make a net”. She also said – you hear the future calling – that RogueArt acted like a producer: “The artist makes his art and we take care of logistics and so on.” Looking back, it’s the publishing she remembers as significant. (Several times in this interview, she refers to her “nerdy” side, her enjoyment in fishing up facts to preserve them in art history.) “Artists need publications in order to be able to share how exhibitions were made and how they were documented,” she says. “They need to expand beyond the typical art gallery context, beyond the museum context. We were offering a platform, whether in the form of a book, a monograph, a corporate catalogue of artworks.” Were art fairs on her radar? “Sort of. I remember our first art fair as Valentine Willie Fine Art girls, in the late 1990s in Singapore … I was, like, really? Then by a whole series of happy coincidences, I met Jonathan Napack, so I knew there was this other thing that was really an art fair.” Napack was an American journalist who’d moved to Hong Kong in 1997 and wrote about art and food. In 2003, he’d become Art Basel’s representative in Asia and in 2006, he’d organised an Art Basel Conversations panel at Beijing’s National Art Museum, a significant first. He died suddenly, in 2007, aged 39, just as the regional canvas was about to change. The following year, ART HK made its debut and proved that a fair could flourish and that if you built it, they (galleries, buyers, the public) would come. Its founding director was Magnus Renfrew and when ART HK was acquired by MCH Group – Art Basel’s holding company – in 2011, he stayed on as director of Art Basel Hong Kong. The inaugural show was in May 2013. Two months later, Renfrew rang Ooi and asked her to be a VIP representative for Southeast Asia. In that role, she continued to work at RogueArt but travelled to Hong Kong twice a year – once for the fair, once for autumn meetings – as well as attending the Basel and Miami shows to support other VIP reps. (“It’s not a Miss World situation where if you’re Miss Malaysia you have to be with the Malaysians,” she says. “You’re not pinned by your geographical origin and it was important for all of us reps to have experience of all three shows.”) Renfrew, now based in Taiwan where he’s founding director of art fair Taipei Dangdai, had met Ooi in Kuala Lumpur and says that he was impressed by her energy, intelligence and sharp wit. He also writes, in an email, that she has “a good heart”. Asked to define that phrase further, he writes: “She is tough but she is genuine and has high integrity and a passion and commitment to promote art in Asia.” In 2014, when he stepped down as Art Basel’s director in Hong Kong, Renfrew says he wanted a successor who deserved the role. “That may sound strange but, as I had put so much of myself into building the fair from the beginning, and having lived and breathed it for seven years, this was beyond professionally important to me – it was also emotionally important.” Although he wasn’t directly involved in the decision, he supported her as a candidate and was “very happy” when her appointment was announced. Ooi was initially aghast at the idea. When Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s global director, rang and suggested she come in for an interview, she asked him if he was crazy. Had she not thought, even for a millisecond, that she might be in the running? “No. It was just shocking. It took a whole lot of convincing from a whole lot of people to say, ‘OK, let’s try this.’ But ultimately it was Marc who planted that little saying in my head: if it doesn’t scare you, why do it?” What was her mother’s reaction? For a long moment, Ooi hesitates. “Well, to be honest with you … my mum doesn’t really understand my career and that’s OK. I mean, she knows I’m in the art world, she knows I’m not starving. There was a time when she was really pleased I was teaching part-time at a college in KL. She said, ‘Good, then I can tell my friends you teach art in college.’ But most of the time, she’d tell people I’m in advertising or design. That sort of work.” And what did her co-founders at RogueArt say? She smiles. “These are lifelong friends that are practically my sisters. I’m sort of their honorary ex-member, an alumnus.” In January 2015 she officially became Art Basel Hong Kong’s director, which means that, like Renfrew, she’s been living and breathing it for seven years. For the first few, she liked to compare the rapidly expanding Hong Kong fair to a child on steroids whose vertebrae hadn’t yet formed. How’s that metaphor doing? “The child has grown tremendously, thanks to very accelerated years from 2016 to 2019. Boom! It got bigger, better, shinier and there’s so much attention on it, which is amazing because the whole point of Art Basel Hong Kong is about shining a spotlight on this region, on the ecosystem here. Yes, it feels like the pandemic balanced it out a little bit …” Going through recent history, it takes a moment to recall that when 24 overseas galleries wrote to Spiegler and Ooi in January 2020 saying it wasn’t a good year to hold the fair – and asking for, among other things, a 50 per cent reduction in booth fees – the issue was the Hong Kong protests. In that case, Spiegler and Ooi wrote back expressing sympathy, declining to reduce booth fees and stating that “we have actually seen an increase in VIP registration from mainland China”. The problem soon mutated into Covid-19 and the fair was cancelled . As Ooi puts it, “Little did we know it was a collision of everything. “It’s a collective system,” she says of the operation. “Out of the Hong Kong office, it’s me and Andrew [Strachan, general manager Asia]. Yes, it’s a global team but there is also regional autonomy. Marc trusts us to make the right decisions because we are sitting here, we are on the ground. We have an office with 24, 25 team members. If we’re going to call ourselves Art Basel Hong Kong we have to own it.” She’d moved to Hong Kong when she was appointed. “I’d run into her a few times at the airport and she was handling various things and was stressed, but her attitude is always so positive, she has a positive influence on me,” says architect and collector William Lim. “In the early years, there was very little attention paid to Hong Kong artists. Now there’s more hype, the prices are higher and pieces are already sold when I get to see them.” The one mild criticism you hear of Ooi among Hong Kong art circles is that she’s not perceived as being present enough in the city, but “I came, I relocated”, she says. “I’m supposed to get my Hong Kong permanent ID this year. But I also lived out of a suitcase for six months in a year, as one would expect: the job is director Asia. It means staying in touch with this part of the world, and you know how huge distances are and how much there is to see.” These days, the child may not exhibit the same pumped-up growth, but at least its arrested-development phase seems to be coming to an end. “I know it was a smaller fair last year – 104 galleries – but to me it was the most beautiful thing we’ve ever put together,” she says. “No one could come, obviously, but we pulled it off because the galleries believed in it.” It was a “hybrid fair” – part physical, part digital – as is this year’s, in which 130 galleries will take part. The strength of the youthful spine, however, has yet to be tested. The week of our interview coincided with criticism of M+ for removing three works, including Wang Xingwei’s New Beijing (2001) – bloodied penguins being transported away from Tiananmen Square by cycle, a reference to a famous 1989 photograph – during a rehang. Some commentators viewed it as censorship in response to the national security law (although a strong case could be made that Wang’s St Thomas (1997), which replaced New Beijing and shows two men in uniform looming over a cowering individual, is more controversially relevant to Hong Kong eyes). “Last year there was a lot of speculation as well,” she says, about the new law. “Within Art Basel, there’s a whole application process by galleries. Within each show you have a group of selection committee members. We’re not going to deny that artists are going to address immediate surroundings and, you know, concerns of the zeitgeist … it’s about the quality of how it’s expressed and how works are presented.” She’s equally circumspect about the January purchase by MCH Group of a minority share (15 per cent) in Singapore’s new fair Art SG, due to launch in January 2023. There had been some artistic flip-flopping: MCH had originally bought a minority share in 2016, then sold it in 2018. Art SG is part of the Art Assembly, which was co-founded by Renfrew and is an affiliation of international art fairs. Asked if Spiegler discussed the share purchase with her, she says cautiously, “To some extent. That’s a little different because it’s our parent company so a different area altogether. Obviously there is some consultation but … as to where the information lands … the board at MCH will be the ones who have the final say.” In a subsequent email, Spiegler, who describes Ooi as a personal friend and refers to her “scintillating spirit”, says that she “has the diplomatic skills and resilience to handle the incredible complexity of running one of the most important art fairs in the world”. Sometimes, at the end of an Art Basel Hong Kong day, you can feel that you’ve spent it in a hanger filled with (however unusually colourful) office cubicles under fluorescent lighting. It’s often wonderful; and it’s a trade fair in a convention centre. When Ooi is asked if she could equally be selling, say, washing machines, there’s a sharp intake of breath before the diplomatic resilience kicks in. She talks about the artists’ creativity, she talks about the administrative logistics of dealing with 35,000 square metres of floor space, and she combines both in a single vivid image: “It’s like building a floating city for five days.” A little later, she says, “I know we’re a sales platform and I will not run away from that DNA. But, gosh. I love every single moment when it comes to the show. Really, this is not put on – it’s a difficult job but the love for the art, the love for the region, is real.”