Benson Yip Chi-fung

Yip's standout pieces in this year's show at the Chinese University were a series of four photographic works themed around policemen and gangsters. They're highly choreographed, dramatic images with a keen sense of the absurd. For all their uniformed seriousness, Yip's cops are marginal figures, hanging around possible crime scenes in hallways and on fire escapes, brandishing their guns but also watching television, holding teddy bears and playing board games while life goes on, oblivious, in the background.

In Search, they are indeed conducting a frantic search - of the fine arts section of a library. And in Corridor, they're playing the popular Chinese board game fei hang kei.

Yip says his work is intended to show the absurdity of Hong Kong life. It certainly does. Games feature prominently in this series and other works - from the policeman engrossed in a TV game show in Stairs, to the televised football match projected onto the beer bellies of a trio of couch potatoes in Three People. Yip is a sharp observer of the mini-melodramas of modern life and the bigger game of which they are a part, combining sly humour and surrealist artifice in a clever pastiche of documentary photography.

Beryl Pak Wong-yee

Pak, one of this year's Art School graduates, explores her relationship with Hong Kong in A Sense of Place. It's a deceptively simple video installation in which an indistinct figure cloaked in darkness is slowly wrapped in slender illuminated coils that cast a dim, chemical light on the contours of the face and body.

At first the work seems highly abstract, the silence that accompanies the measured movements punctuated occasionally by reverse playback of what sounds like approaching traffic. But gradually the light, a visual metaphor for the city, gives the figure an identity, defining it yet also binding it, challenging the individual to escape from its grip. It's a mesmerising piece by a new talent who shows a deep engagement with her subject matter.

Halley Cheng

Home After 30th of May is a droll installation in which Cheng practically recreates his living room in the gallery at the Chinese University. Cheng beams himself into the gallery, too, projected onto the back of a white sofa, sipping tea and apparently waiting for the phone to ring. It's a hymn to domesticity, and very little happens.

It's the end of the academic year, the artist has finished his studies, and cushions bearing drawings of remote controls allude to the temptations of sofa surfing as a clock ticks away the minutes before another sip of tea. A painting hanging behind the couch turns out to be nothing other than a depiction of ... Cheng's living room.

His sideways look at his own apparent ennui shows wit, and his conflation of the prosaic domestic realm with the formality of the gallery environs deflates the notion of art as a rarefied pursuit. Cheng's work hints at a multidisciplinary career in the making.

Kelly Yeung Hoi-lee

Should sex be prohibited in public? Yeung apparently thinks not, but faced with prevailing social norms, she has fashioned a range of bags and accessories entitled (), 'for people to use in public to let them have sex in their minds'. Her creations, still on show at Baptist University's Academy of Visual Arts, don't merely evoke sex organs; they're almost full-frontal genitalia. Folds of lush pink silk beckon from inside black lace-lipped purses embroidered with phallic flowers.

She also offers a book chronicling a long tradition of sex in art, and asking why such works are politely ignored in most art education. Yeung says () is an ongoing project. Watch for its offspring slung over the shoulders of artsy types in future.

Li Yuen-man

Li's Cremation - 894 Pages of History fills half a room at the Academy of Visual Arts with a tender lament for a lost love. It's an intensely personal piece in which white clay, extruded and tangled like tagliatelle, stands in for the shredded paper of letters between the couple that the artist has burned. The bird's nests of clay 'ashes' sit in recesses in the floor, as if in shallow graves, each bearing a date, and Li's musings about her ill-fated relationship adorn the walls.

Li dedicates the piece to her former love in a gesture of touching generosity and with it says her final goodbye, lending grace to what's already a moving work of art and part of a contemplative oeuvre.

Sarine Chan Shuet-ying

Chan offers a beautifully crafted, thoughtful deconstruction of an everyday object in Nothing is Everything, Everything is Nothing, her presentation at the Art School. She reverse-cast a humble Chinese teapot, rotating it through a series of iterations allowing the viewer to examine the object from all sides, but never permitting a full view of the object at once. Behind the series of reverse casts through which the pot is revealed, there's a strip painted ornamentally in a familiar blue and white teapot pattern.

There's a touch of British sculptor Rachel Whiteread about the piece, not least in the questions Chan raises about empty versus occupied space. In forcing the viewer to interpolate parts of the object that are physically absent, she hijacks their cognitive processes in a way that's both playful and intriguing. No matter how mundane her chosen object, her approach is far from dull.

Given the quality of the work by some of this year's graduates, and their clear potential, it seems a shame gifted artists have been put

in the shade by all the froth about contemporary art from the mainland. A survey of art schools shows there's no shortage of genuine talent locally. The question is whether collectors are sufficiently switched on to recognise it.

Current, Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University, ends July 20