Australian artist John Young Zerunge contends that Hong Kong's cultural life does not end at the Chek Lap Kok departure gate or the Lo Wu border barrier.
'I really think Hong Kong is a lot more than the place,' he says. 'Hong Kong is the place plus the diaspora; people who construct it from the outside. That is also a lot of the culture.'
A member of that diaspora himself, Young's paintings and installations have been exhibited around the world, including at New York's Guggenheim Museum, in the United States; the Alexander Ochs galleries in Berlin, Germany, and Beijing; and the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra. But some Hongkongers will be familiar with his work in a more everyday setting: he designed a piece displayed in the North Point MTR station.
'It seeps into people's subconscious,' Young says of the five-storey work of art. 'I didn't want to do something too big and obvious when people are going to and from the train - art is not a competition with advertising nor is it part of it. It was the first [public art project of the MTR], so there was a lot of pressure to get it right.'
Hong Kong-born Young grew up in Repulse Bay and remembers the area as a 'very quiet, remote place'.
'It's not like it is now. My parents moved into the area after the second world war and it was very much like the countryside,' he says. 'A lot of people ask me where I come from and Hong Kong conjures up images of this incredibly dense place, but it wasn't like that.'