Cover Wolfe von Lenkiewicz in his studio (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz in his studio (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
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British artist Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, a direct descendant of the Swan King’s court painter, discusses his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and translating machine dreams into slow oil paint
At first glance, the world of Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, who paints under the name Von Wolfe, feels deeply haunted. His compositions boast a meticulous precision that instantly recalls the Northern Renaissance and classical masters. Yet, this academic refinement is disrupted by a distinct, theatrical intensity—figures with heightened, dramatic facial expressions and surreal postures that refuse to let the eye rest. It is a visual language that feels both incredibly contemporary and deeply ancestral. Standing before these canvases, one can almost trace the bloodline of the artist’s great-grandfather, Baron von Schlossberg, who painted dramatic Germanic legends and medieval Swan Knight sagas on the castle walls of Bavaria’s “Swan King”, Ludwig II.
“There is something quietly moving about knowing that the impulse to make images with pigment and patience runs back through my blood like an underground river,” he says, reflecting on his visits to Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein Castle, some of which frescoes his great-grandfather helped paint. “His surviving works beyond those castle walls are competent paintings carefully composed, technically sound, a man who understood his craft within the conventions of his time. I enjoy the lineage.”
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Above ‘Eternal Flames’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
‘Eternal Flames’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
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Now, that river of pigment has flowed to Hong Kong’s Tang Contemporary Art for his first solo exhibition in the city, titled Eternal Flames. The exhibition, running until August 16, represents an intersection of classical oil painting, philosophical inquiry and modern technology, and marks his expansion into using UV-printed acrylic with LED illumination housed in powder-coated frames—a process that makes the paintings glow.
At the heart of Von Wolfe’s current practice is an unexpected collaborator: artificial intelligence. The visual artist, who earned a philosophy degree from the University of York, is largely self-taught in painting, though he grew up surrounded by art as the son of the prominent British painter Robert Lenkiewicz. In 2022, he started experimenting with using AI in his creative process.
“The question that drove me to using AI wasn’t technical at all—it was existential,” he says. “How do you escape the prison of your own taste? When you paint from imagination alone, you’re circulating inside the boundaries of what you already know how to imagine.” By utilising algorithms trained on the entire visual archive of human culture, the artist frees his compositions from personal bias. He refers to this hybrid methodology as “Latent Realism”—a continuous loop where machine dreaming and human intuition merge.
Above ‘The Stallions Path’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
‘The Stallions Path’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
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Rather than acting as a traditional “image maker”, he positions himself as what literary theorist Roland Barthes called a “scriptor”. “I work with images that emerge from a process of generative abundance,” he says. “From everything that surfaces, I select only a handful. They hum with a charge that cannot be engineered. Only recognised. And that recognition—that’s where authorship lives now.”
While the algorithm offers speed in generating images, Von Wolfe’s physical painting process is its absolute antithesis. Once an image is chosen from the digital ether, it undergoes a painstaking “second birth” on Belgian linen. “The machine produces raw material at a speed that should terrify us,” he says. “Selection interrupts that current. But selection alone isn’t enough.” Employing techniques inherited from Titian and Van Eyck, Von Wolfe builds each piece using grisaille underpainting and translucent glazes, layer upon layer.
Above ‘Fear and Trembling’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
‘Fear and Trembling’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
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The results are these expressive, dream-like and sometimes sinister paintings imbued with the artist’s philosophical and phycological musings. In Fear and Trembling—a direct nod to the father of existentialism, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—a lunging figure is tensed in absolute panic. Directly beside them sit two perfectly serene dogs. “Kierkegaard wrote about the dizziness of freedom,” Von Wolfe says. “These dogs have never experienced that dizziness. Sometimes the most profound thing a painting can do is put absolute panic next to absolute peace and let the silence between them do all the work.”
In other works, animals serve as quiet, powerful subversions of human control. The cats in Her Dark Familiar and Pearled Royalty lock eyes with the viewer with an unsettling, sovereign presence. “You come in expecting to look at paintings, and discover, slowly, that the paintings may be looking back,” he says.
Above ‘Dancing Cats’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
Above ‘Poised Power’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
‘Dancing Cats’ by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (Image: courtesy of Von Wolfe)
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Meanwhile, The Stallions Path explores a quieter, physical connection: two women sharing a horse mid-stride. “I wanted to paint non-verbal inheritance, the way certain kinds of knowing pass between bodies across generations without ever needing language,” says the artist.
It is entirely fitting that this body of work at Tang Contemporary, saturated with the recurring motif of the pearl, has arrived in Hong Kong. For Von Wolfe, the pearl, which takes months and even years to form inside a mollusk, represents the slow accumulation of time—much like his paintings, and much like the host city itself.
Above Wolfe von Lenkiewicz in his studio (Image: courtesy of Nick Knight)
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz in his studio (Image: courtesy of Nick Knight)
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“Hong Kong as the Pearl of the Orient—I couldn’t have designed a better metaphor,” he says. “This city exists at the intersection of systems [due to its colonial history] … the harbour is simultaneously barrier and bridge. Looking at the skyline from Kowloon means seeing yourself reflected back in thousands of windows. Seeing and being seen are inseparable here. And that structural doubling is exactly what the exhibition is organised around.”
He describes his paintings—with the recurring images of pearls, pairs, mirrors and returned gazes—as “a space to dwell in”. “I hope what the audiences discover at my exhibition isn’t an intellectual thesis about AI or art history, but something [far] more visceral and harder to name,” he says. “Each time you encounter something familiar, [like a motif in my work,] you see it differently. Recognition deepens. TS Eliot called this ‘the still point’, which is the moment perception stops cycling and simply holds. That’s what these paintings try to offer: not explanation, not readily made meanings, but [how,] standing before the image, you [might just] find yourself seen in return.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
