Adeline Ooi, Asia director of Art Basel, on getting into the art fair business and what it’s like to build ‘a floating city for five days’

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.”