Artistically, Eastaugh falls somewhere between being a landscapist, an abstract painter and - since he started using wool and cotton thread stitching two years ago - an old-fashioned tailor. 'It started in Antarctica,' he says. 'I liked the idea of using a slow, laborious technique to create a slow laborious line to symbolise what it feels like to travel. Making a stitch, slowly working across this vast canvas, is like travelling across the tundra.'

He's been to the White Continent twice, on ships that resupply research stations. 'It's absolutely gorgeous,' he says. 'The most beautiful place. The scale is incomprehensible. You feel this thing called the sublime. It makes you acknowledge your immortality. You feel so small. Mankind, we're not so great after all.'

Eastaugh started working on Packing in Antarctica, and then stitched and travelled his way to Melbourne, Brisbane and then Taipei, where he finally finished it. 'I don't have a home, so I have to do all my work on the road,' he says. Antarctica Chinoiserie-scape, a jagged mountainscape painted with sharp white peaks, was also started in Antarctica. He finished it while climbing the 3,952-metre Yu Shan mountain in the central Taiwanese highlands. 'I was thinking about the Earth and all its crazy icescapes,' he says. 'Did you know there are hundreds of different types of sea ice? My pieces are not direct representations of nature. Instead, I pick up bits and pieces from the landscape, and from my weird and wonderful experiences.' The resulting works are funny combinations of random images, albeit presented in controlled and geometric ways.

The Melbourne native never travelled further than New Zealand during his school days. 'Then I decided to run away,' Eastaugh says. 'I got into an art programme in Norway, started travelling and forgot to stop.' He's been on the road ever since, spending a maximum of three or four months in one place, after which he says he gets jittery. At one point, he set up a studio in Beijing. 'I worked very hard for a few months, but then I got sick of being in this large smelly city and I had to go somewhere less populated. So I went to Mongolia,' he says. He stayed in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, which he calls 'sad and poor, with a little Russian flavour. It's like a small city surrounded by a quarter of a million yurts. It's their version of the suburbs. God knows how they survive.'

From his experiences came Rooted (Mongolia), which will be part of the Hong Kong show. It's a series of 30 small pieces painted and embroidered on bandages, an appropriate medium considering it's about a people and culture scraping by to survive. Each individual square contains the same three elements - a horizon, some sort of structure or house, and a root system underneath. The above-ground objects are identifiable parts of daily Mongolian life: a pine cone (a popular snack), a detail from a gargoyle on a temple or an ovoo, a shamanistic sacred site in Mongolian belief. It's what's under the horizon, however, that's more interesting. Here, Eastaugh has stitched colourful lines that snake mysteriously in and out, like secret tunnels, or roots of a tree, or lines on a map.

On one hand, it's a reflection of how some Mongolians literally live. 'All these homeless kids live in this underground system of streets and sewers,' he says. 'They have to, because, if they stayed above ground in mid-winter, they would die of the cold. It's outrageous.' On the other hand, the subterranean setting symbolises society's need, or perceived need, to have people pinned to one place. 'It's about roots, or my lack thereof. Here I am, wandering around with my ridiculous nomadic lifestyle. And here is this ancient nomadic culture, and all these people trying to adapt to a modern city, or a non-nomadic lifestyle,' he says. 'Is it better or worse to be tied down by roots?'

This spring, the Australia-China Council sponsored Eastaugh's three-month residency at a Taipei artist village. Its 12 studios, for an even mix of Taiwanese and foreign artists, was home for a while. 'There was a bookshop, a cafe and was near the centre of town. It was nice,' Eastaugh says. 'The Taiwanese government, like many governments, has realised that art makes a city better and that it's a good way to wave the flag, to get foreign interest in, and to show, 'Hey, this is a hip kind of place'.' The Hong Kong government doesn't seem to have figured this out yet, Eastaugh says. 'It helps, when you live in a large city covered in concrete, to have a few gems of beauty.'

Eastaugh will probably never get stuck in a concrete city, but he's honest about the life he might be missing out on. 'I'm sometimes very envious of people with girlfriends, wives, homes and families, but then again, they are envious of me,' he says. The closest Eastaugh comes to having financial and geographical anchors are the five galleries - in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Brisbane, Paris and Amsterdam - that regularly show his works.

His openings are the only things that require him to be at a specific place at a specific time. 'For me, openings are celebrations that I've done a body of work and that I'm finally brave enough to make it public,' he says.