His brother, former urban councillor Paul Young Tze-kong, still lives in Hong Kong, and one of Young's installations - comprising Diptych, Lumina, Anchor and Loops - has been on permanent display at the North Point MTR station since March 2002. Young says he'll continue to have his works shown in Hong Kong, on the mainland and across the region.

He has just finished work on a collaborative tapestry that will be donated by the state of Victoria to a new library in Nanjing. The large hanging, based on his artwork, took four weavers from the Victorian Tapestry Workshop 10 months to complete. Young says he enjoyed the process so much he plans to do another.

He has also begun work on a land-related project inspired by the area around his beach house south-west of Melbourne. 'For the first time I'm starting to have a rapport with the land,' he says. And he has started researching the history of Chinese people in Australia.

Young says it still rankles that in 2003 his name was removed from a shortlist to represent the city at the Venice Biennale because he was a non-resident. 'I think Hong Kong abandons migrants.'

He's also critical of the local visual arts scene, despite the opening of several experimental galleries. 'I still find the general comprehension of visual arts isn't really taken seriously,' Young says. 'Hong Kong has never had a developed art world as such, and the local artists have it pretty hard if they want to remain artists.'

Young accepts that the Hong Kong of his childhood in the 1960s no longer exists. He sees himself - and many others - as 'creating an image of Hong Kong from the outside in our work. I think that that's a very constructive thing to do.'

Young, who has just turned 50, says he had many peers at the beginning of his career. Now, only a handful still make art. 'You suddenly realise that you do need to sustain a voice, and that's where I think I can contribute to Hong Kong if only people were interested - the voice of somebody who has worked in art for 30 years.'

Young learnt art appreciation and calligraphy as a child. Because his Sydney school had no formal art programme, he studied with a private tutor. In 1973, he won an art school scholarship, but instead studied art history, mathematics and philosophy at university. He says his youthful views about painting and the importance of critical ideas were at odds with developments such as minimalism and conceptualism.

But in 1978, he began studying for a painting degree at the Sydney College of the Arts, where he later taught for 12 years, leaving in 1994 to become a fulltime artist.

Young says the election of the conservative government of John Howard a decade ago marked a change in direction. 'A lot of exhibitions were going to Asia, but that all stopped and I had to change my focus and start showing in Germany and Europe. My focus had to change in many ways. The idea of introducing Australian work to Asia lost momentum.' As a result, he abandoned plans to open a studio in Shenzhen, and instead took his wife and two children to Melbourne from Sydney.

For his latest so-called double ground works, which combine painting and digital printing, Young uses a computer to create a huge digital image, which is printed on canvas. Assistants paint specified areas, under his supervision.

Young says the results are no less authentic than if he painted it all himself. The work is more about the ideas and about the 'sensuous act of painting', than about whose hand carries it out, he says. 'I see myself more as a composer and the assistants as a quartet.'

Exhibitions of his work recently ended in Melbourne, Brisbane and Israel, and shows in Berlin and Beijing are due to be held next year. But wherever in the world he makes or shows his work, Young says it carries resonances of his birthplace - but in his own way.

'I know that there's exoticism in Chinese culture, but I don't want to be part of that,' he says. 'I think that my project is deeply involved with Hong Kong, whether the Hong Kong art community - accepts is, maybe, too strong a word - acknowledges it or not. It's a question of time.'