The work was a graduation work when Leung was studying for a Masters of Arts in Fine Arts in Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was observing the social situation at that time and wanted to use an artwork as a method to break barriers of voices from the same circles and facilitate interrelations and connectivity. “Not a Community Guided Tour” to him is an event to walk around the city together, with people from different backgrounds. As they walk and observe the city, the encounters they have during the experience would provoke conversation and discussion. Participants were recruited via an open call on his Instagram platform where they need to fill in some questions, such as whether they are students or are currently working, and whether the study or work relates to art and culture. From this, Leung divided participants into 3 categories: art and culture related, art and culture non-related, and students. For each of a total of 15-16 tours, he grouped participants from each category, and including him, to form a tour of four people. The relation began from communications in the group WhatsApp created by Leung to identify the date, time to meet, and places to visit. Because participants of different backgrounds were intentionally grouped, e.g. one from finance, one from health service, and another from art background, their value systems and approaches to how things are perceived could be drastically different. This generated exciting interplays of interrelations.   

The first iteration of the work (2021) was the only one where participants were invited to walk and move around the city together while conversing. For the second iteration (2022) at TangLau Space (an artist-run space that was designed as a home), the third iteration at The Park Lane hotel room (2024), and the fourth iteration at Hong Kong Shouson Theatre (2025), the work evolved to participants sitting down and having a meal together under different contexts and locations.

I participated in the first iteration of the work, where my group involved a fashion design student and someone who works in IT and enjoys photography like I did. I do not recall the exact details of the event, but I remembered we made decisions to relate to each other from our moving bodies—from having lunch at a Cha Chan Teng together, to visiting an exhibition at Parallel Space. We went to Golden Plaza where most of the traditional Chinese wedding dress shops resided, and Leung and I pretended to be a couple to ask about wedding related matters. Our conversations revolved around what we were experiencing together at the time, which then evolved into a shared bodily and emotional experience of creating movements together at a rooftop of an old building around Sham Shui Po. For other groups, Leung mentioned they had very different experiences. There was one where the group encountered two kids at Cattle Depot Artist Village. The orange parallel chairs at the space led the two kids to imagine and direct a short film about a thief stealing a passenger’s phone inside the MTR, where the group participants performed as actors.

Leung created a space, instructed a circumstance for human relations which provoked our bodily, mental and emotional shared experiences. He mentioned that he did not consider curating the details of each tour, allowing the relational experiences to flow along with the choices that the participants of the group made and the circumstances that they were drawn towards. Participants were encouraged to explore the unknown, discover different possibilities of art together, and note down their experiences in a mini notepad alongside taking polaroids as documentations of the work. Because the work involved touring the city where our bodies would be actively engaged in the activity, naturally, the work would allow circumstances for connections between our bodies e.g. how we would walk together. And then, our eyes, the visual senses we have while touring the city, would also activate our mind for related conversations. It was unfortunate to observe that these bodily senses that elicited mental and emotional connections were diminished in the later iterations of the works, when they limited participants’ movement to sitting down and having a meal together.

For the fourth iteration at Hong Kong Shouson Theatre (2025), the work became interesting again. This time, it embedded its experimental nature into the structure of a traditional artform. The work was being contextualised in a theatre setting as an “art performance”. Even though participants were again invited to have a meal and a discussion together, it was on the stage while an audience would be present to watch this happening as observers. 

This time, I was one of the few audience-observers sitting off-stage, observing the live “art performance” of a total of 15 people. This iteration of the work interested me again, because the context of the theatre with how the stage was set up e.g. the elevated stage with spotlights, all provoked conscious and subconscious feelings for the participants to perform, bodily and conversationally. The stage was set up with a long eating table in the middle, a screen at the back of the stage projecting the top view of the table, showing the live movements of the performance. On the left of the stage closer to the stairs of the stage, there was a sofa with a coffee table, with water jugs and cups on top. On the right side, there was a hanging rank for people to place their belongings. And lastly on the far right, there was a black board with written statements of the rules for this “art performance”.

At the first hour, all participants were very cautious with how they behaved, telling from their body languages. As an audience-observer, there wasn’t much that was engaging, especially when it was difficult to hear what was being discussed on stage. A worker of this project who was sitting off-stage noticed this tension. She ran up to the stage after around 30 minutes, sat herself down around the eating table and asserted herself to the conversation using an intentionally louder voice. Food arrived around a similar time, participants began to let loose after the meal, perhaps because of having experienced the communal body language to grab shared food from the centre and eat. They then freely moved around the stage as well as off the stage to go to the bathroom. Some participants became temporary audience-observers at the auditorium, discussing with another how they would be observed on stage. It was prominent to see a change in their “art performance” afterwards. They would speak louder, slower, and also create more gestures when delivering their message in the conversation. One of them began to move around the stage more dramatically, and used more body language to converse and relate to others on stage. Some moved themselves to different sides of the stage, sitting down on the sofa, grabbing water, getting items from the rack etc. It became apparent to me that in this setting, perhaps because of the presence of an audience too, participants were more aware of their bodies, on how their bodies would relate and influence the conversation of the entire “art performance”.

From speaking with Leung, he had a lot of considerations when designing the process of how this work would become prior to the actual event. First of all, he intentionally did the open call via his social media platform, and did not want participants to sign up via the ticket purchase platform, art-mate. He wanted participants to join the “art performance” without going through the process of the work being read as a typical theatre performance from their daily experiences. And then, the live projection of the “art performance” was something that he felt was an important element to the performance. This top view voyeuristic live camera was a great way to allow both the participants themselves and the audience-observers to observe how relations evolved on stage during the “art performance” - from participants sitting with distance apart in the beginning, to later on how they move between seats and on the stage changed their bodily distance and relations with each other. He also was assertive about letting participants walk up the stage from the front door instead of the backstage, reducing the chance of being embodied as actors in traditional theatre shows. For other stage designs, different colours and styles of chairs and cups were placed around the stage, encouraging participants’ individual autonomy for the “art performance”, starting from picking their own chair to sit on as well as their own cups. He considered many other details as well, such as, what kind of food to eat to create a feeling of sharism, whether to place a TV on stage to create a feeling of home, whether participants needed to take off their shoes when entering the stage to feel a sense of security and safety, what to write on the blackboard etc. Some were not followed through due to the restraints of the venue.

As for other audience-observers sitting off-stage, some treated it as if they were sitting at home, watching a Live TV show. They would occasionally engage with their phones, couples would cuddle and whisper into each others’ ears. The relationship between the participants on-stage, and the audience observer off-stage blurred the expectation of their roles in a traditional theatre performance.

At the end of the “art performance”, a participant suggested cutting up the table cloth (which was also an artwork created by Leung), and divided the pieces between the participants, serving as a documentation of the happening.