The art of distinction

LINDY Lee looks Chinese, is Chinese. But the tan is Sydney beaches and when she opens her mouth the accent is a strident mix of her home state, Queensland, and her adopted one, New South Wales.

In her paintings, European images dominate as she reworks portraits by European old masters, taking photocopied reproductions as her starting point. It's a contradiction that's no accident: ''It is as though I have to declare my position in European culture through this imagery. No one in a culture has to declare their inclusion,'' she says.

''I use European images because I am trying to understand my own identity. I get a shock sometimes when I see my own face in the mirror because I forget that I am Chinese.

''These European faces are, at one level, trying on this other identity to see how it fits, so in a sense they are a self portrait.'' In Hong Kong for the opening of Transcultural Painting, an exhibition of four modern Australian artists whose work reflects Asian influences, the contradiction is more pronounced: here people expect Cantonese when Ms Lee opens her mouth, but she speaks only a little. Her family migrated from Xinhui in Guangdong to Australia 45 years ago and she grew up in Brisbane.

John Young (Young Ze Runge) has more recent Chinese roots: his family lives in Happy Valley, his brother, Paul Young Tze-kong, is an urban councillor. But he went to Sydney to study in 1967 and has been there since. It is the modern art scene in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, not Hong Kong, of which he is a part.

He has an unusual grounding for an artist: he turned down a scholarship to the National Art School to do a degree in philosophy and mathematics, a move directly attributable to his Hong Kong childhood. ''I felt I needed a more rounded education, coming from Hong Kong I felt the humanities were lacking in my education,'' he says.