Why Malaysian Adeline Ooi is the perfect pick for Art Basel's Asia director

On Christmas Eve, curator and art advisor Adeline Ooi received an early present: she signed on to become the new Asia director for Art Basel, the art fair where she had been VIP relations manager for Southeast Asia for two years. On Tuesday, she was in Hong Kong to meet journalists over afternoon tea at the Mandarin Oriental hotel.

In just 10 weeks, from March 15 to March 17, Art Basel in Hong Kong will be open to the public at the Convention and Exhibition Centre. The invitation-only preview begins on March 13.

"We considered over two dozen candidates for this key position and interviewed more than a dozen of them," says Art Basel director Marc Spiegler. "Although in the end we chose a candidate who had already worked with us, we considered candidates from across the world and from every sector of the art world. We feel that Adeline is best qualified to do what needs to happen next, to catalyse the show's development by bringing more collectors from across Asia and the West here to Hong Kong."

Ooi was born in 1976 in Malaysia, where she grew up on a palm oil estate. She studied fine arts at Central Saint Martins in London. "I could never imagine myself working nine to five in an office," she says with a laugh when asked what drew her to study fine arts.

"I don't really have a specific answer, say, it was that one Van Gogh painting that led me to study art, but I was always very interested in the creative field. At that time, at that age, I felt that fine art was the way I wanted to go."