At the end of 1993, Yeung's father died. One year later, his mother, who had been in a coma for 18 months, died, as well. And in July 2001, a former lover killed himself in the Netherlands. Yeung, who had studied at the School for New Dance in Amsterdam between 1996 and 1998, wanted to choreograph a tribute to those who had passed from his life. He worked on a piece during 2001 and 2002.

'But it's very difficult to find the drive,' he says. 'You feel low. At many rehearsal sessions, I was lying on the floor like a piece of meat.' Eventually, he created a 20-minute work, entitled In Memory of his Body, but he wasn't satisfied with what it could convey to an audience.

A discovery came with Sars last spring. 'Before Sars, no one in Hong Kong had time and space to think about life and death,' Yeung says. 'Then, during Sars, people started to feel love is more important. I thought, life and death is not just personal to me. I felt maybe this is the time to share that experience with a Hong Kong audience.'

When the Leisure and Cultural Services Department approached him last year about creating a new work, Yeung decided to focus on loss - and gain. The Chinese title for Metalove means 'the physical shape dies in extreme happiness'. The English title reflects the sense of transformation undergone by both the dead and those left behind.

'At the beginning, I thought of a basic question: if you love a person who's dead, is it still love? If you know that person no longer exists, then can you still send

your love?'

The 70-minute work is the longest solo piece he's choreographed. Play Boys, which was a group piece presented at the 2002 Hong Kong Arts Festival, was an 80-minute exploration of the politics of sex and the male body. It conferred on Yeung the public image of a challenging extrovert, ahead of his time in pushing the boundaries of what it's possible to convey in dance.

That same year, he was given the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Rising Artist (Dance) award. There's some irony in this avant-garde perception - not least because Yeung came to both a dance career, and the realisation that he's gay, exceptionally late. He was 27 and working in a marketing job with the City Contemporary Dance Company when he was encouraged to dance by the CCDC's prime mover, Willie Tsao. That led, eventually, to his two years in the Netherlands. (The severed hand, by the way, was sent over specially from Amsterdam.)

Another conflict in his life revolves around his parents never having known he was gay. 'I realised my sexual orientation very late,' Yeung says. 'I suppressed it within the Chinese culture of the family.' To this day, only one of his four siblings knows about it - but all those now-missing links in his life are coming together on stage, as part of a greater observation on general loss.

'In this dance, you won't find a story, and you won't find a name,' he says. 'I'm not trying to write a diary. It's such a personal thing.'

Yeung, as might be expected of a dancer - especially one as articulate as he is - speaks with his face, his remarkably flexible hands and much of his small, compact body.

'Why peel off those layers, be so self-indulgent and make people buy tickets to see me? It kills to see those dancers who say 'I'm suffering! I'm very sad!' What's the point?

'You have to find a balance between form and self-indulgence,' he says.

Metalove, Jun 18-19, 8pm, Studio Theatre, Cultural Centre, $90, $120, Urbtix, Inquiries: 2111 5999