'When you have art chosen by committee, the most extreme examples get filtered out and you get lots of mediocre art.'

Wong's paintings have hung in most of the world's major mus- eums, including the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao as well as London's Royal Academy of the Arts and the British Art Museum. His works are also in major corp- orate collections, such as Amer- ican Express, Chase Manhattan, HSBC, UBS and The Peninsula.

But he still makes an effort to show at local galleries such as Grotto, a small upstairs space in Central specialising in Hong Kong-Chinese artists.

The works in his current exhibition, Window Dreams, are collages framed by white borders, priced from $25,000 to $100,000. Wong created the 18 large-scale pieces between January and August and says they're a sort of retrospective.

'This series is about looking back at my own past,' he says. 'I'm sitting in front of a window and I start to dream of all the different people and things that I have loved over the years. I have had a diverse life, so there are many different images - traditional Chinese mountains, but also Hong Kong's crammed buildings. These are all my different worlds.'

Some feature the strict geo- metric shapes of western graphic design, a reference to Wong's pioneering work in that field.

Others are refreshingly playful and include cartoon-like characters, or digital photographs of Hong Kong's skyline, which Wong printed out on an ink jet printer, glued down onto the paper and then painted over.

Strikingly different are the Chinese landscapes: one has the vast white negative space of a Ming dynasty painting, two others have the dark, dense feel of Tang dyn- asty mountainscapes, emphasised by ancient poems written in Wong's flowing calligraphy down the sides.

Together, the works are a tour de force that flaunts both his technical mastery of traditional Chinese art, as well as his ability to try new forms in western modern art.

'This is the biggest show the gallery has had for many years,' says Grotto owner Henry Au-yeung. 'I've known and admired Wong since I was a student, so this is very special for me.'

Most established artists find one style that works - and sells - and stick to it. Wong is a rarity as someone who takes risks and changes his style, even so late in his career. The last time Wong held a solo exhibition in Hong Kong was in 2002 at Hanart TZ Gallery, where he created oil paintings on fabrics, such as canvas and linen. For his Grotto show, however, he goes back to traditional ink on paper. 'I think his Chinese ink on paper works are the best,' says Au-yeung. 'That's what he did in the 60s and 70s. It's where his roots are.'

Born Wong Wuxie, the Dongguan native settled in Hong Kong as a child following the second world war and has been an active promoter of local culture for almost half a century. While still in secondary school, he worked as the co-publisher of the periodical Poetry Blossoms.

In 1958, at the age of 20, Wong co-founded the Hong Kong Modern Literature and Art Association and two years later organised the first Hong Kong International Salon of Paintings - quite an achievement considering how undeveloped the art scene was then: the Hong Kong Museum of Art didn't open until 1962 and, even then, it was just a rented space in City Hall.

In 1961, the up-and-coming art student found his way into the prestigious Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil, which led to a lifetime of showing his own works internationally - decades before it was common for Hong Kong artists to exhibit abroad and long before Chinese art became fashionable.

During the 1960s, Hong Kong was struggling to build its own art scene and to find its own artistic identity. Today, Hong Kong has new worries about becoming 'just another Chinese city', and local artists are battling to create works unique to a Hong Kong experience that is much more westernised than that of the mainland.

'Everyone uses this term now: 'east meets west,'' says Wong. 'But it's a silly thing to say because, if you are truly a Hong Kong artist, your art will be east meets west just by the nature of who you are. Too many young artists are creating fashionable east-meets-west art that clashes. My goal is to blend the east and the west seamlessly.

'I grew up here in the 40s and 50s, so I really felt I was growing up as a Chinese person in a British colony. My connection to Chinese culture was very strong. I'm different from people who grew up in the 60s and 70s, who grew up very resentful of China because of the Cultural Revolution and the fact that the bamboo curtain had come down. Starting from the 60s, there were two worlds on the opposite sides of the border, and two populations that began to take totally different roads in life.

'From that generation on, nobody in Hong Kong understood China. Most Hong Kong people never went to China before the border opened up a bit in the late 70s. All they knew of China was through words and images. In Hong Kong, we were reading different books, watching different TV shows, eating different food, wearing different clothes. And when we started to go there in the 80s, we were like visitors in a foreign land.

'But when we went to the west, even if we wore western brand clothing and spoke English and sent our children there to study, we knew we were not western either. I spent almost 10 years in New York, and yet, when I see Americans, I know I'm not 100 per cent one of them. I can never be so crazy - they are so free about saying and doing whatever they want. As a Chinese person, I can never be like that.'

Although Wong doesn't create literal works about political issues, his art has reflected the ongoing struggle between China and the rest of the world. 'I remember Tiananmen in 1989,' he says. 'I was in New York, in Chinatown, and I saw it on the TV. I went home and started my Agitated Waters series to represent my emotions.' Those were his famed 'X' compositions, a subtle form of disagreement with the government's violent reaction to student pro-democracy protests.

'I don't have a straight life path. My fate is to be a human pendulum, swinging back and forth between eastern and western extremes, but never settling at either end. Sometimes, when I've just finished something that looks like a Tang dynasty landscape, I think, 'I don't want to cross a certain line and get too Chinese. It's time for me to swing back to the west.''

As a tireless promoter of Hong Kong arts, Wong's plate is full, but he's already thinking ahead to his next project.

'My next works will be more expressionistic in style with big calligraphic strokes, not very precise. I have a painting I did like this in Shenzhen. It's of roses,' he says. 'I'm not done with all the paintings I want to do. I've not explored all of that wonderful grey area between the east and the west. I want to explore even more. I might be getting old, but my art still gives me energy to go on.'

Wucius Wong's Window Dreams, Mon-Sat, 11am-7pm, Grotto Fine Art, 2/F 31 C-D Wyndham St, Central, tel: 2121 2270. Ends Oct 7