Imee Ooi
Imee Ooi FRSA is a Chinese-Malaysian record producer, composer, and singer who composes and arranges music for classic Buddhist chant, mantra, and dharani. She performs her compositions in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Mandarin. In 1997 she founded a record label, I.M.M. Musicworks, to publish her music. She has released more than 50 albums.
Ooi also composed and directed three highly acclaimed stage musicals: Siddhartha, Above Full Moon, and Princess Wen Cheng.
Biography
Early life
Ooi was born in Taiping, Malaysia to a musically inclined Hoklo family. Her grandfather, who was a writer and dramatist, emigrated to Malaysia from Guangdong, China. Ooi's mother was a piano teacher; Imee and her four siblings all learned piano. Ooi continued her study of piano and trained as a classical pianist.Career
In the early 1990s, after training as a classical pianist, she followed her mother's example and in turn became a piano teacher, before moving into composition, creating film music for cinema or television series.Buddhist vegetarian, she decided to specialize in Buddhist music, creating from sacred texts which she performs in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Mandarin, some are translated into English. She also composes musicals and performs in concerts.
In 1997 she founded a record label, I.M.M. Musicworks, to publish her music.
In 2015, she formed the male vocal group, named the Jing Shi Jin Gang which means "Guardians of the Dharma" with whom she toured internationally in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Imee is a discreet person. Her private life never comes up in the interviews she gives, preferring to talk only about her art and her spiritual path: