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].
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 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?
