Selling multimillion-dollar art? It’s just another day for Christie’s Hong Kong auctioneer Emmanuelle Chan
The auctioneer tells of her journey from med school to the art world, and explains how she stays on top of everything the day artworks go under the hammer
Born and raised in Hong Kong, the 36-year-old now heads the day sales and is a specialist in 20th and 21st century art. She leads auctions in Mandarin, English and French. But she wasn’t always selling multimillion-dollar paintings. “I first went to med school, actually,” she says. “I did not do well.” She then switched to law and art history, eventually earning a master’s in art history.
But ballet was Chan’s first real connection to art. “My teacher not only taught me how to dance,” she says, “but how to convey emotions to the viewer using body expression. Then it was opera, photography and from then on, visual arts. I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some capacity.”
Chan interned at a gallery, then a museum and finally an auction house in New York in 2012. Recalling her first day, she says: “I went into the warehouse and I discovered all these Chinese works of art, ceramics, bronzes, jades – I could see all of these centuries just merged into one room and really passionate specialists talking about these works.” She beams. “There was no money talk. It was all about the history and the work. I thought, ‘This is so freaking amazing. I have to do this for the rest of my life.’”
Chan certainly seems on track to do so. She did her first auction in 2021, a charity auction for Hong Kong Marriage Equality. “One of the auctioneers gave me [a piece of] advice: remember to have fun. And I forgot that advice completely because I was just so nervous.” Eventually, the nerves dissipated and Chan went on to sell one lot for eight times its starting bid.
These days, Chan hosts two auctions a year. Keeping her busy in the months in between is the necessary admin work such as authentication and provenance, as well as catching up with clients. But on those two occasions of the year, the pressure is on and she often opts out of sleeping entirely. “You just have these two hours to sell six months of work,” she says.
The hours leading up to the auctions are just as crucial. Below, she opens a brief yet busy window into her life on auction day.