DIEN BERZIGA: SHAPING MEMORY

Dien Berziga is a Chinese-Italian artist based in London whose practice explores the interrelationship between materiality, identity, and form. Working across painting, digital collage, 3D printing, and assemblage, Berziga approaches image-making as a process of excavation - of surfaces, symbols, and shared memory. His works are grounded in tactile experimentation, where found objects and fabricated elements converge to form layered compositions that hover between abstraction and figuration.

At the core of his practice lies a fascination with how material encodes narrative. Latex skins, thick impasto, and precise painterly marks are applied not just for effect, but to build surfaces that carry emotional and cultural weight. These are not merely aesthetic choices - they are embodied gestures. Whether referencing familial ornamentation, architectural detail, or the accidental residue of urban life, Berziga’s works articulate a visual language shaped by both inherited tradition and spontaneous play.

Though often imbued with a sense of childlike wonder - through bold forms, stylised symbols, and vibrant colour - the work resists nostalgia. Rather, Berziga uses this visual strategy to interrogate how memory is formed, preserved, and refracted through material. It is an invitation to look slowly, and to see the act of making as a form of remembering.resonance are carried through form.

Between Image and Structure

One of the most distinctive aspects of Berziga’s practice is his use of the frame as an extension of the image. In his “frame-paintings,” the boundary is not a limit but a field of engagement. The frames - often handcrafted - recall ornamental motifs from both Chinese and Italian contexts, drawing attention to their hybrid resonance while remaining formally restrained.

This structural gesture expands the language of painting beyond the canvas. It transforms the relationship between image and viewer, inside and outside, central and peripheral. The interplay between interior and frame becomes a visual conversation - each element echoing, interrupting, or amplifying the other.

Over recent years, geometric motifs have become increasingly present in Berziga’s vocabulary. Repetition, symmetry, and modular patterning emerge as a way to explore control and disruption, architecture and gesture. These forms do not impose clarity, but hold tension. They reflect a desire to find rhythm amid complexity, and to balance intuition with structure.

A Surface That Remembers

For Berziga, the painted surface is not a static image, but a field of memory. It holds the marks of process, the traces of revision, and the quiet presence of things left unsaid. The textures - layered, cracked, smoothed, scraped - become sites of accumulation, where personal and collective histories coalesce.

His approach is shaped by a culturally hybrid identity, informed by lived experience between China and Italy. In this way, the works function as provisional archives: not of specific narratives, but of cultural residues, fleeting impressions, and emotional registers that resist fixed interpretation.

There is no linear storytelling here. Instead, Berziga constructs visual environments where meaning unfolds through proximity, slowness, and material intimacy. His works preserve, but they also transform - offering spaces where heritage is not merely remembered, but remade through the act of making. In this insistence on surface, Berziga finds a quiet form of resistance: against forgetting, against disconnection, and in favour of continuity through craft.

Images: ©Dien Berziga, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO