Auctioneer Phyllis Kao in action.
We’ve all watched auctions - some of us have bid in them (and won) - but what is it like to be standing on the rostrum with all eyes on you overseeing the sale of multi-million dollar pieces of art, antiques, collectibles and even the odd dinosaur fossil?
That’s just a regular day at the office for Phyllis Kao, Vice President of Luxury at global auction house Sotheby’s, and one of the world’s best known auctioneers.
Kao stands out amidst an industry traditionally dominated by older white males. She first hit the headlines when she oversaw the 2024 auction of Apex, a stegosaurus that sold for a then-record $44.6 million. She peppered the 15-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s Madison Avenue auction house with jokes and jibes designed to “gently encourage” the bidders to increase their offers.
“At $6 million, nice way to start,” she said of the first bid unusually dropping in the bidders name. When bidding climbed to $13 million, she leaned on the podium and said: “I’ll give you some time” sparking a ripple of laughter in the room. “Give it a think…Would you like to try a smaller bite?”
The unusually humorous and personal auction sparked the New York Times to reach out and profile Kao, with a video of the auction watched 350,000 times on the Sotheby’s YouTube page.
Kao, who has worked in auction houses since graduating from college 17 years ago, says she wasn’t trying to get that noticed, but she likes to try and make all auctions she is in charge of lively and entertaining.
“Selling Apex was definitely one of my favourite auctions to date,” she says. “I have so much gratitude for being given the opportunity. I had taken well-known auctions before, but Apex was really the first time I had really got the attention of people outside of the industry.”
A New York Times journalist who was at the sale called her the next day asking to interview her. She recalls them saying, “We expected the auctioneer to be a white British male, who are you!?”
Kao was born in the San Francisco Bay Area to a Taiwanese mother and father and was raised multilingual, which turned out to be a huge advantage when the Chinese art market started to take off in the early noughties.
After studying Chinese history, art history, French, and ancient Greek at Columbia University in New York, she knew immediately that she wanted to work with art, and got a job at a small auction house in California.
Part of her job was to be the auctioneer’s clerk — watching the auctioneer at work and noting down every bid and auction in case of a challenge in the days before livestreaming and digital recording.
“I was like the failsafe,” she recalled. “But one day the auctioneer turned to me and said ‘Do you want to try taking the next auction?’”
“I was too young to be afraid, and said ‘sure I can do it!” Suddenly there she was on the rostrum overseeing a decorative art sale. “It was smaller stakes stuff,” she said. “But I enjoyed it from the very first sale I took.”
Kao worked hard and got noticed by other auction houses, and jumped between smaller houses on both coasts before landing at Sotheby’s in 2016, where she has also overseen the sale of a rare $2 million Tang Dynasty gilt-bronze Buddhist figure.
“I take it very seriously,’ she says of auctioneering. “Perhaps more seriously than other people.” She practices a lot, even meditating and performing vocal warm-ups before stepping out on the stage.
The hardest part, though, is “you can’t really rehearse… it’s not like acting a part and learning lines as you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to be able to think on your feet, to articulate on the fly.”
Kao specializes in being “entertaining but in a non-scripted non-rehearsed way,” explaining that auctions can go on for more than three hours and “you don’t want to feel like it’s dragging on”.
“People are looking at your face for an hour, two hours, three hours… It’s nice to inject some entertainment,” she says. “It can get monotonous just repeating numbers.”
Her sense of fashion livens things up too, with Kao having become enough of a style reference she was tapped by Vogue as part of their 55 Best Dressed People of 2025.
But numbers though are what auctions are all about. Even with digital assistance, Kao, says super-quick mental arithmetic is essential for all wannabe auctioneers. “It’s all very good trying to be witty, but the worst thing would be getting something wrong.”
An increasing proportion of auctions are going online, being livestreamed and hosted by artificial intelligence, but Kao says there will always be a place for live human-led auctions.
“I’m actually not worried about the future of auctioneering," she says. “Yes, for more modest auctions where we have a good idea of the price, the auction could be run digitally.
“But a live performance is always more convincing, and it is always going to yield better outcomes. Humans respond to humans, to charm, to unique human psychological pressures.”
Something that Sotheby’s certainly benefits from, as she notes: “A good auctioneer can add 15% to the bottom line.”
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