By: Lareina Mo
On bustling streets in Hong Kong, traffic weaves into an unbroken golden stream, and voices mingle with the tinkling of signal lights between towering buildings. Pedestrians hurry by in a constant flow, each lost in their own rush. Then suddenly, someone pauses, staring curiously at a section of pavement beneath their feet, on which a line reads:
“I fell in love in Hong Kong.”
That’s one of the quiet love letters @7soulsdeep has left across the city. A famous but elusive street artist from Brooklyn, New York, he has long scattered sentimental graffiti on walls and pavements, leaving his artistic footprints in New York, Italy and beyond. Known as the “Street Poet,” he uses mostly simple black and white strokes to pen short yet intimate phrases about love, vulnerability, dreams and human connection across the streets and walls of the city. In March 2026, he arrived in Hong Kong, marking not only his Asian debut but also, in his own words, “the start of a new chapter for my soul and for my heart.”
“I feel very comfortable here in Hong Kong while I get to know the city in its different shades and ways,” @7soulsdeep wrote on Instagram. After devoting two weeks to “embed” himself into the place, he said he had developed a deep emotional connection to it.
For him, Hong Kong is more than a skyline of skyscrapers——it’s a space brimming with love and human warmth, where he felt a strong desire to share something he “never wrote” before, and his work finally “found…a home.”
This journey is not just his personal outdoor adventure across Hong Kong. With more and more people coming across his creations and sharing them on social media, a trend of seeking out and collecting @7soulsdeep’s graffiti has taken off. Just like participants in an “urban treasure hunt,”people have wandered the streets of Hong Kong Island, from Causeway Bay to Sai Ying Pun, piecing together and photographing his handwritten messages, forming a kind of online urban love letter to the city.
During the process, a number of people say that what they have encountered is far more than those creative words.
“When you start hunting for the lines, the whole city suddenly turns different. You begin to look up at the walls, notice the corners of old buildings, and even wander into alleys you’d normally ignore. Then suddenly, on a slightly weathered wall, you find a sentence that reads: ‘Hong Kong isn’t the same without you.’ That moment is truly magical,” said Ivis Ai, a 27-year-old blogger.
For Lia Chow, a 20-year-old student in Hong Kong, the experience of seeking out the art itself around the city was equally fascinating. Walking along the streets in search of the graffiti, with only a few passers-by around, Lia felt free from all distractions, able to “breathe deeply and truly absorb the city’s vibe.”
“Sai Wan at midnight was so enchanting. Watching the incense curl slowly in front of the Man Mo Temple, seeing the warm yellow glow from old residential buildings and the various patterns painted on the outer walls, it was in that moment that I deeply felt the aesthetic this city has accumulated over decades,” she said.
In fast-paced Hong Kong, @7soulsdeep’s works have evoked diverse reactions among people. Feeling anxious and overwhelmed by job searching, 24-year-old Margarita Li decided to step out for a walk. “It was as if fate had led me there, at my lowest point, I saw his words written on a pavement tile: ‘Still a kid with dreams.’ Suddenly, I felt my anxiety soothed a lot,” she said.
Many share the same warmth toward those hidden lines. “It’s really touching. In such a concrete jungle, someone has secretly written poems in the corners, even for strangers,” said Ai, the blogger.
Yet even as those street verses have carved out a tender space amid the hustle of urban life, they are technically not allowed. In Hong Kong, unauthorized public markings are illegal, deemed detrimental to public hygiene, the cityscape and public property, with offenders liable to a maximum fine of $2000 HKD or three months’ imprisonment, according to government regulations. If the act is charged under a tougher law of Criminal Damage, that penalty can go up to 10 years imprisonment.
But on a wall bearing a “No Graffiti” sign, one line quietly reads: “I see the beauty in you no one else sees.”
Some anonymous “street artists” have even playfully responded to @7soulsdeep’s pieces. Beneath the phrase “Can we still fall in love this summer?” a wry and witty line has been added: “Depends if you still have a job.”
