In recent years, Lin has begun retiring many of his company's earlier works to pour his energies into new projects. He has said his goal is to create one work a year. He won't be able to this year, but he managed two new pieces last year.

In the past six months, Cloud Gate has collaborated with artist Cai Guoqiang and modern dancer Akram Kahn. Cai's visual direction of the starkly rendered Wind Shadow was his first theatre work in decades, and Kahn's gritty Dark Shadow, which had its premiere last month in Taipei, was the first time Kahn had choreographed for a company other than his own London-based group.

Before the Dark Shadow opened, Kahn said he considered Lin his mentor. 'Cloud Gate is such a powerful company, not just in Asia but also in the west,' he said. 'I have such great respect for Mr Lin, that after 30 years, he's still making beautiful and poetic work, and that is inspiring for me. It just makes me more humble that I have so much more to learn.'

Dark Shadow begins with a woman victim of a car crash face down on the stage in a pool of blood. From there, it progresses in a fragmented narrative that uses Kahn's meditations on death to break down the paradox of an 'ordinary tragedy'. To this effect, Kahn uses everything from dancehall breakbeats as musical accompaniment to the speaking parts in a darkly comic TV talk show scene about death, reincarnation and cadaver makeup.

None of that would have been possible in the Cloud Gate of even two years ago, which had carved a place for itself with a proprietary mixture of modern dance, ballet and martial arts. 'Akram brought a new perspective, new language, new style, new way of training,' says Lin.

To prepare Hong Kong audiences, Lin conceived the forthcoming programme as a 'mini-retrospective'. Tale of the White Serpent will be composed mainly of early narrative dances such as White Serpent based on classical Chinese legends, myths and literature. The second piece, White, presents a minimal core of dance language almost completely devoid of identifiable symbols.

Lin envisaged White as a short, stand-alone piece when he created it in 1997-98. He has since come to see the piece as a turning point for Cloud Gate and last year added second and third parts, turning it into a full-length work. 'Little did I know it was going to be a very important work,' he says.

The first movement of White (White 1) opens with a male dancer on stage playing a bamboo flute. Three female dancers, also in white, appear and engage in a series of solos, duets and trios marked by often almost mechanical, straight-line movements.

Utterly distinct from the spiralling, flowing movements in many other Cloud Gate works, the gestures here seem to refer to little other than themselves and the space around them, which is divided by eight flat panels that descend from above the stage. The aesthetic is purist, minimal and largely abstract.

Lin describes the radical jump from China lore to high modernism as 'skipping a century', but says it was necessary. By shedding everything recognisable from his choreography, he put his company into a cocoon from which it was able to emerge as something completely different. The result is 'a new body'. White 1 was this body's dramatic birth to the audience, but Lin has been developing it behind the scenes. Three years earlier, he altered the training for his dancers, requiring them to meditate and practise both martial arts and a form of qigong, or internal martial arts.

The result is a body that is suddenly grounded. 'It's effort and effortlessness,' Lin says. 'It looks so simple, but the energy is so controlled.'

White 1 also marked what Lin calls the archetypes for nearly everything in the decade since, including his Cursive series and two other pared-down examinations of eastern symbols, Moon Shadow and Bamboo Dream, all of which draw from that basic vocabulary.

The addition of the final two parts of White came last year, in part as a recognition by Lin of the seminal kernel in the earlier work. To extend the piece, he simply offered the fundamentals established in White 1 to a new generation of dancers to interpret on their own.

Both movements feature more dancers and more technically difficult moves - the simplicity of White 1 was in part necessitated by the original dancers, who were all over 40.

At other times, however, the action is chaotic and scattered, like a toy shop full of monochrome robots gone haywire. But it slowly unites as the dancers emerge from under a dark cloud in part two into the daylight of part three. This is where Lin presents 'that new body at work. Once we master a language that's unique, we ask ourselves, 'Do we care about those Chinese symbols?' We don't.'

Lin says this allows him and Cloud Gate to go on exploring. 'But even so, we won't forget our audience. That's why we'll perform White Serpent and these other works one last time.'

The Tale of the White Serpent, Wed, Thu, 8.15pm; White, Apr 28 (sold out), 29, 8.15pm, Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, HK$120-HK$380. Inquiries: 2268 7323