The chairman of Sotheby’s Asia and Sotheby’s Diamonds, Patti Wong has spent her entire three-decade career at the global auction house. She was initially based in London for nearly fifteen years, where she was head of the Private Client Services Department, before becoming Sotheby’s Asia chairman in 2004, a role in which she has helped to cultivate both Asian clients’ growing taste for western art and western clients’ growing taste for Asian art.

Patti Wong is also the chairman of Sotheby’s Diamonds, a global retail venture established in 2005. The auction house was already involved in a lot of private diamond sales, and she set up the new business as a result of demand from clients, allowing them to privately acquire both important diamonds and fine diamond jewellery made by the house to its own designs based on the exceptional diamonds it acquires.