James Ooi was a writer for a number of years, publishing short stories in various media. Professionally he is a chartered accountant from the UK. Having worked many years, he found that painting to be an outlet for expression of his creativity. He decided to explore painting seriously over the past year.

A local Kuala Lumpur boy, he studied at Victoria Institution, Kuala Lumpur and later furthered his studies in Chartered Accountancy and completed his MBA from Australia a few years later. As a person, he loves to read and is quiet and reflective by nature. His favorite books are Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and Ignorance by Milan Kundera.

His ideas are mostly influenced by his life experiences, his philosophy in life and also his hopes for the future. In his paintings, you will find bright variety of colors which are his way of expressing his positive outlook in life as it is

His painting themes are mostly abstract expressions, the concept of duality of life, of the positive and the negative and if you like, the yin and the yang.

A Quote from James on his paintings: "Colors and pictures are never squeaky clean and perfect because life is never perfect, you have the sad and the happy, pleasure and pain.

I paint what I feel, it feels like energy flowing from my body, through my arms, my wrist, my hand and my fingers on to the brush, the paint and onto the canvas. What I have experienced, heard, felt or touched in some way, I translate it onto the painting. You can feel my paintings, you can look at my paintings in different angle and yet it is again different... I just find it mystifying too but it is what it is, an expression my life, my death, my desires and my detachments in life...

All my paintings are different, random expressions of the feelings I feel. Red for me is life, blue is peace, green is mother earth and yellow is positivity of the sun's energy. I create new paintings from the energies in my life. Everything changes and with that, my paintings will never be the same and each is unique... I can never recreate it again...

I look at the landscape, it is brown, some smattering of red, black, green, purple, blue and orange.. There is no perfection and despite that there is beauty in the random imperfection of life..

A tree is not all green, its red, brown, black, yellow ...
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