The Most Watched Auctioneer in the World Isn’t Who the Industry Expected

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1601528" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/AM5_1059.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A close-up shows Phyllis Kao leaning forward over the Sotheby’s rostrum, smiling and holding the bidding hammer while people on phone banks sit blurred in the background.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’As her visibility has grown, Kao has become a cultural touchpoint far beyond the traditional art market. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo: ANGUS MORDANT</span>’>

Phyllis Kao did not enter the auction world quietly. She walked onto the rostrum and altered the expectations of what authority in that space can look and sound like. In an industry that has long coded power as British, masculine and emotionally neutral, Kao has built a different model of command: theatrical when it needs to be, scholarly when it should be and fully, unapologetically herself.

Her instinct for holding attention began long before she ever called bids. She grew up performing on the violin and understood early on what it means to sustain focus and tension over time. The discipline and the stagecraft translated seamlessly. “If you are going to ask people to listen to you for two or three hours, you have to keep them engaged,” she told Observer. “I grew up performing, so that part was always natural to me.” But Kao did not arrive to be ornamental or palatable. She arrived to run the room.

The beginning of her career was accidental. Fresh out of Columbia, where she earned her bachelor’s in Chinese history, she took a temporary job at a small Northern California auction house. Because she spoke Mandarin, she was asked to take phone bids on six-figure Chinese oil paintings during a booming market. She won multiple works, and that temporary job turned into a full-time one. When she was later invited to take the rostrum herself, she did not hesitate. “When you are that young, you are too stupid to be scared,” she said. She called her very first sale bilingually. “Nobody asked me to sell bilingually. It just felt natural, and the audience lit up.”

What separated Kao from her earliest years was not precocity, but fearlessness. She understood the room not as a static place where protocol is followed, but as a site of performance where psychology, pacing and charisma can determine the outcome. She has been at Sotheby’s for close to a decade now, and today she is senior vice president of client strategy, navigating the high-stakes intersection of business, collectors and scholarship.

But the art world first began paying attention to her presence on the podium in November 2023, when she anchored the Now Evening Auction during the fall marquee week. The sale went white glove and launched her into a new tier of recognition within the industry. That night also introduced her visual language to a much broader audience. Kao wore a silver Armani jacket that belonged to her mother. On the podium, it read not as adornment but as continuity. She has family in Taiwan and grew up between cultural worlds, and clothing for her is a way of folding history into the professional stage.

Her visibility intensified again when she appeared in the viral Alexis Bittar campaign, playing an auctioneer in a satirical bidding scene. It was a crossover moment that signaled something new: the world outside the art industry understood the archetype of the auctioneer, and in that world, she already read as the face of it.

Then came the Apex stegosaurus sale in July 2024, which pushed her far beyond the walls of the art market and made her unmistakably visible. A global public that does not normally watch evening sales suddenly knew her face, voice and cadence. The momentum from that moment helped propel Kao into a year of heightened cultural attention, culminating in her being named to the New York Times’ Most Stylish of 2024 list. “Being in the New York Times was really life-changing,” she said. “Everyone opens the Times all around the world. I was getting messages from people in so many different industries—people I had never spoken to, with completely different opportunities, inquiries and congratulations. I had not experienced anything like that outside the auction community before.”

Her rise reflects the evolution of the auction world itself. In the post-COVID era, evening sales have become broadcast events as much as market mechanisms. The podium is no longer just a platform but a stage designed for cameras, pacing charts and viewers who may be watching on TikTok, Instagram or via livestream. In other words, power is not private anymore. That said, Kao did not emerge because auctions became a spectacle. Auctions becoming a spectacle simply made visible what she had already been doing.

For most of the modern auction era, authority on the rostrum was practically a monoculture. Jussi Pylkkänen, Oliver Barker, Adrian Meyer and Robert C. Woolley defined the professional archetype, and the industry treated that cadence as the sound of credibility itself. To be taken seriously was to emulate them. But the terrain is changing. Helena Newman has led at Sotheby’s Europe for more than two decades, and Sarah Kruger has become a cornerstone at Phillips. Danielle So and, more recently, YüGe Wang at Christie’s have helped reshape the expectations of both the room and the audience. Kao is one of the shift’s defining faces.

She has observed the transition from inside the institution. “I think the whole world has shifted since I left school,” she said. “And it has been baby steps all the way. But when I look around and I look at our auctioneer roster here at Sotheby's New York, we have parity. I do not think that was the case ten years ago. There have been so many incremental small steps in the right direction.” Progress is real, she emphasized, but not total. “We have seen progress, but of course, there are still old habits and old biases.” And she is clear about the stakes of visibility. “Representation matters, but skill matters too. You need both. It cannot just be that there are more women on the rostrum. We have to be extraordinary. And we are.”

Excellence, for Kao, is not a performance trick. Her preparation for each sale is extensive and precise. She tours the exhibition repeatedly, first with specialists across categories, then again alone. She memorizes her remarks so she can speak without a teleprompter and adjust in real time. She warms up her voice and rehearses her pacing. She eats protein before a sale to sustain stamina. She meditates and rehearses her mindset just as rigorously as her lines. She carries talismans in her pocket and asks for a specific phrase from her mentor before she goes up. “I like to hear from my mentor before I go up,” she said. “It is superstition.” The glamour of the evening might be what viewers see, but it rests on a structure of discipline that is invisible by design.

Fashion is part of that structure, and Kao uses it to direct attention, set tone and build narrative. “I have always loved fashion. I was a picky dresser from the time I could get dressed,” she said. She collects vintage and wears pieces inherited from relatives. Designers now approach her to dress her for sales, galas and award ceremonies because they understand that the camera is watching her as closely as the collectors are. During the May 2025 sale, she wore a Jonathan Cohen suit whose palette and gestural strokes echoed the Monet anchoring the evening.

Yet despite her visibility, Kao does not approach her career as a branding exercise. “I have never been a strategist for my own career,” she said. “My philosophy has been to not plan too much and just go with the flow. If a window opens, jump through it.” That openness has been her compass, but what sustains her is internal rather than external. “Trust yourself in every sense. Trust your gut, trust your ability, trust your potential, and trust that it is going to work out if you do all those things.”

Kao’s ascent is a cultural recalibration. Auctioneering has long been a white-shoe boys’ club built on the fantasy that power is neutral and money is a matter of taste. Kao walks into that system with charm, fluency, strategy, performance instinct and the kind of charisma that does not apologize for itself. She is not just calling bids. She is shaping the room, redirecting desire, and rewriting what authority looks like on the rostrum. We finally have a leading woman the audience actively wants to watch, and the industry’s biggest secret is that it needed her long before it realized it.

The auction world is not known for rapid evolution. Its power structures are old, its hierarchies deeply rooted and its traditions resistant to interruption. Kao has built a different model from within. She has not pleaded for space. She has taken it. She has shown that authority does not require erasure, that charisma does not preclude rigor and that visibility can come from mastery rather than mystique. The rostrum has always belonged to whoever can control the room. Right now, that is Phyllis Kao.

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