Collection: Boms

Boms (b. 1990) is a graffiti artist working in Hong Kong. Starting out in his early practice with acrylic on canvas, Boms strayed away from the traditional medium after discovering street dancing and hip-hop at the age of 17. It was through the local hip-hop scene that he was exposed to graffiti art for the first time, and its down-to-earth power in capturing city dwellers’ attention with bursts of creativity soon also captured his artistic imagination. He started to devote himself to spray-painting murals and is now one of Hong Kong’s most recognizable street artists.

“My favorite part of graffiti is its down-to-earth rawness. It is also a kind of connection between me and the city that I can literally see, that constantly reminds me of where I’m from.” 

The core character of Boms’s artistic persona derives from his days working in a design agency, where, as he put it, “the overwhelming stress, anger and depression built up like a bomb.” From this daily grind, Boms (or “Ar Jar”, from the Cantonese for “explode”) was born. “Ar Jar” is a spiritual monster born from the negative energy that so often envelops city dwellers living under high stress — and Boms believes that everyone in Hong Kong has a similar monster living in their mind, ready to explode outwards and manifest itself in reality. 

As a born and bred local artist, Boms celebrates Hong Kong’s stories by imbuing his imaginative compositions with both figures and texts representative of local culture that resonate with viewers and passers-by. He gives life to common objects and machines that we see in our everyday life, then builds on these objects to tell his own stories, imagining machines transforming into monsters and conveying his own world in unified, immersive compositions. In each of his works, his “inner bomb” can be seen exploding onto the wall with precision and imagination, ebb and flow.