Curators selected designer Alan Chan Yau-kin and craft collective Mindcraft Group to represent Hong Kong under the biennale's Hyper Design theme. Chan's work on two soft-drink multinationals is prominent at the show's entrance. Mindcraft Group, which comprises Hong Kong ceramicist Mak Yee-fun, Hong Kong-based sculptor Zhang Beiru and mainland artist Ruan Jiewang, take on traditional Chinese design in a corner room. Their work consists of a table spread with unadorned pottery, cabinets full of carved objects and what could be a scholar's desk, rendered in minimalist, life-sized plastic and lacquered bright red. Hong Kong curator Johnson Chang Tsong-zung of Hanart TZ Gallery says that this primarily Hong Kong group produced 'the only handcraft with traditional roots in the entire bienniale', especially when the sprawling event turned more to pop western and pan-Asian works than the Chinese art on which it was founded.

In People's Park, the gleaming Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art presented Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity, which features Hong Kong's Sara Tse Suk-ting's delicate installation of porcelain-cast T-shirts and Wallace Chan Sai-ying's crystal carvings of small, knick-knack Buddhas. But if the Hong Kong works evoked a specifically Chinese craft tradition, they seemed meek compared with other aesthetic-based pieces such as Zhan Wang's stainless-steel rock garden boulder, or Ai and Serge Spitzer's massive rows of trompe l'oeil blue-on-white ceramics.

At the Bund's Shanghai Gallery of Art, David Chan Ho-yeung, a former director of Para/Site Art Space included Hong Kong new-media artist Hung Keung's mirrors and simplified characters in City in Progress: Live from Zhang Jiang, an exhibition responding to the building of a new hi-tech factory centre on the fringes of Pudong.

Chan relates this piece to Zhang Jiang's 'generic urban condition, and the zoning to control people's movements', but Hung explains the work's extra dimension of linguistic and cultural tension between the mainland and Hong Kong. After learning of Beijing's push to make simplified characters more standard in Chinese communities around the world, Hung says he felt 'a bit surprised and uneasy, because simplified Chinese has a meaning - it was developed during the Cultural Revolution - and traditional characters bear so much history and culture'.

In the interactive piece, Hung explores the disconnected moment when 'your mouth is saying one thing, but your heart is saying another', yet remains neutral. The black calligraphy characters keep mutating in form and meaning, as 'cow' becomes 'city' and back again - suggesting rapid change, but also the continuity and shared roots of the two systems.

Perhaps the most exciting show was Yellow Box in Qingpu, an exhibition, forum and live event in Qingpu Xiao Ximen development. Initiated by architect and artist Hu Xiangcheng, Xiao Ximen consists of interlinked courtyards, walkways and rooms in traditional Chinese architectural styles.

Although no one is quite sure what the complex will become, this month it's the site for an impressive show curated by Chang and China Academy of Art's Gao Shiming. Hong Kong artist Warren Leung Chi-wo showed some of his Domestica Invisibile photo series of voyeuristic images of Hong Kong people's organisation of cramped domestic space. There was also a sculptural installation of a city made from wooden blocks, paired with a time-lapse video of Leung building it.

And Hong Kong artist Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen presented photos, drawings and an exchange of letters between himself and his girlfriend during a long separation, all of which evoked the association between the moon and homesickness in traditional Chinese poetry. Chang says that Hong Kong artists are as entitled as their mainland counterparts to appear in Xiao Ximen's Yellow Box experiment.

'The relationship to the Yellow Box is exactly the same ... because we've both been colonised by modernity,' he says. Gao celebrates the differences in Hong Kong's art, and says it's smaller, more personal works are special.

'Hong Kong artists have their own style,' the Shandong-born co-curator says. 'It's very private, and it has a quality of daily life which is very important. With their individual messages, [Hong Kong artists] do political art, but without symbols.'

But although Chan highlights the special flavour of Hong Kong art, some Hong Kong artists feel isolated at mainland art shows. Warren Leung says he often 'feels so marginal' taking part in mainland projects. 'You just feel different,' he says. Chan says that with the 'focus on artists from China, meaning the mainland, Hong Kong [art] is an afterthought'.

However, Chang is guardedly optimistic for the future of Hong Kong art.

'Hong Kong artists have always had to survive on their wits, in dealing with the establishment,' he says. It's like everybody trying to go to New York 30 years ago. Hong Kong artists should try to make sure of the Chinese [art world]. If this is a major platform, why not try to get on it?'