I ♡ my boss

I ♡ my Boss reflects on my experience working a part-time job in Groningen during my studies, where my boss repeatedly criticized my braided hair. He told me I looked “like a man,” that braids were “ugly” and “unprofessional,” and even that I was “not Black enough” to wear them. His tone was always casual as if he hadn’t just said something harmful, just a “little” mischievous remark tossed off like any of his other comments about the work shift…which made it to me even more unsettling. What unsettled me most wasn’t just the words themselves, but the way he said them. He even defended them as nothing more than Dutch-style straightforwardness(recht voor z’n raap).

But what shocked me most was that he often spoke about experiencing racism himself as a man of Chinese descent growing in The Nederlands. Yet when I explained that braiding is part of my mother’s ancestral culture, a tradition passed from my grandmother to my mother to me, he dismissed it. Commenting he “didn’t know” that cultures outside of Black communities braided hair but still maintaining that this cultural tradition “makes” women “look ugly” and that it makes me “unprofessional.”

For me, braided haired is not just a style I like, but also a practical way to organize my curly, dry hair and a tradition deeply rooted in family shilha heritage. This painting holds the contradiction of those encounters: how something so intimate and meaningful could provoke such a reaction from a man who himself had spoken about being a victim of racist remarks throughout his life. I Love My Boss becomes is my way to reclaim space, turning the memory into a claim for presence for me and the other who have heard similar remarks in professional settings.

Legati al dito

I ♡ my boss is part of my ongoing series of paintings “Legati al dito” started in 2024, which takes its name from the Italian idiom legarsela al dito…to “tie something around your finger,” a way of saying that a memory or grievance is impossible to forget.

Each work in this series is born from moments in my life when I felt powerless in the face of injustice experiences, but which marked me so deeply that they became indelible. These memories have stayed with me, vivid and insistent, much like the fluorescent and metallic colors I chose to work with. The palette is intentionally resistant to digital reproduction: only in person can the works fully reveal themselves, a reminder of how visceral and inescapable these experiences truly are.

Although they are “pain paintings” by definition, there is also irony and playfulness in them. The sharpness of the memories coexists with a kind of absurdity, a refusal to let them remain silent. Many of my friends—non-white, queer, refugees, migrants and “second-generation” migrants, kids adopted from different counties, just people living precarious lives could recognize themselves in these serie of works, in the way personal stories carry both symbolic weight and real, and lived consequences. This resonance feels powerful to me: these paintings are not only about my past, but also about shared survival, remembrance, resilience and defiance.