Rycah and Bunitah originate in deliberate misspellings. The altered spellings of rica (“rich”) and bonita (“beautiful”) are borrowed from the lexicon of Brazil’s queer scene, where language is continually reinvented as a space of identity, humour, and resistance. Presented individually or as a diptych, the works draw on Shinji Nagabe’s autobiographical experience of growing up as a gay child, marked by bullying and by the belief that happiness, acceptance, and love could only be found through becoming “rich” or “beautiful”—ideals that seemed beyond his reach. Through the aesthetics of drag and the imagery of Brazilian carnival, Nagabe revisits these childhood desires through transformation, excess, and performance, turning vulnerability into strength and shame into celebration.

Rather than treating these desires with irony, Rycah and Bunitah give them a new visibility and dignity. The works transform what once appeared unattainable into an affirmation of self-worth, suggesting that self-esteem need not depend on wealth, beauty, or social validation, but on the possibility of fully inhabiting one’s own existence. By reclaiming expressions from Brazil’s queer vocabulary, Nagabe also pays tribute to a community that has made linguistic invention a form of survival, humour, and belonging. To be ryca or bunitah thus becomes less an ideal of material or physical perfection than an existential position: one of pride, dignity, freedom, and self-celebration.