Dear Hiring Committee,
I started out as a junior graphic designer at Cartoon Network, then took my first management role as creative services manager for CNN International’s Asia headquarters in Hong Kong. The more I did it, the more I wanted to understand how design and creativity drive a business — which took me to a Master of Arts in Innovation Management at Central Saint Martins in London. My research there was on how design thinking and play unlock creativity in people, and how a culture where people feel they belong lets an organization grow. That, in essence, is the craft of building a brand — and an audience — that believes.
That research took me to the Hong Kong Design Centre, where I curated Business of Design Week and Knowledge of Design Week, bringing global industry leaders to Hong Kong for cultural exchange. It also led me to KEF: the Centre’s then-Chairman — who chaired the Gold Peak Group that had acquired KEF Audio — asked me to help turn a respected speaker manufacturer into a direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand people wanted to belong to. I rose from digital to Head of Global Digital Strategy and then VP of Growth, building the ecosystem that made belonging tangible — Sound of Life, Sound Lab, Journey Through Sound and myKEF. Holding global brand governance across Asia-Pacific, Europe and as advisor to the Americas team, I invested in cultural research before each market, led KEF’s first global campaign, Listen and Believe, and opened KEF Music Galleries in four cities (London, Tokyo, Beijing and the Hong Kong relaunch) — training local teams so the standard held everywhere while people made it their own.
After a seven-year run I grew genuinely bored with corporate life, and founded The Boring Nation — a management consultancy that has become a collective for the bored, the curious and the creative. I launched The Artist Launchpad, an incubation platform for emerging artists in the new creative economy. The conviction behind it is simple: as AI makes images, sound and text effectively infinite and free, value returns to what a machine can’t manufacture — human authorship, provenance, taste, and the lived experience of standing in a room with something real. The Boring Nation backs that authorship economy — developing artists, curating their work, and building the audiences that gather around it, taking them from zero to one. It has convinced me that the institutions who understand why people treasure art — not merely how to sell it — will define what comes next.
Which is why this feels less like a change of field than the next chapter of the same work. Sotheby’s has stewarded provenance, authorship and the human story behind an object for nearly three centuries — the very things the AI age is making most valuable, and the ground on which the question I keep returning to will be settled: what is art, and what is creativity, and what is not. At the moment the art business is being redrawn, I would like to help draw that line — bringing twenty years of global-to-local brand building, across many cities and cultures and through local teams you develop and trust, to Sotheby’s across Asia.
I’m Hong Kong-based and available from October 2026. I’d welcome the chance to tell you the rest in person.