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 anything harmful, just a “little” mischievous remark tossed off like a comment about a shift detail…which made it all the more unsettling.

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 tradition make women look “ugly” and that it makes me “unprofessional.”

For me, braiding 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 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 childhood. I Love My Boss becomes a way to reclaim that space, turning the memory of dismissal into a claim for presence.

Legati al dito

I ♡ my boss is part of my ongoing series of paintings “Legati al dito”, 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.