Dien Berziga (b. 2001) is a Chinese-Italian artist living and working in London. His practice
moves across painting and sculpture, integrating found materials and 3D-printing processes,
with close attention paid to how image, surface, and object alike bear the weight of memory,
cultural inheritance, and lived experience. While his work spans a range of media, painting
remains central to his practice. For Berziga, painting is not simply a means of representation,
but a space where matter and narrative are inseparable, where images emerge from
accumulation and revision.
His paintings expose how narratives are already embedded within the material world, in the
residue that surrounds us, lies beneath us, and moves with us through daily life. Matter is not
neutral, nor passive, but dense with personal associations, collective histories, and complicated
emotional charge. Berziga approaches narrative as something nonlinear and unstable,
something that does not unfold in clear sequence, but takes shape through revisions that build
upon and undo the surface. Meaning sediments gradually, with works growing in their darkness
and obscurity until almost eroded in appearance, as though they have been worn down by their
own making. Within Berziga’s practice, decay serves as evidence that a surface has been fully
inhabited. We question whether the subject precedes the material or whether the material itself
gives rise to the subject, because each appears to will the other into being. It is within this
uncertainty that Berziga’s works hold their force.
Berziga’s work converses at once with the analogue and the machine realm. Sculptures
possess an air of childlike wonder, naivety framed in structures parsed from the ecclesiastical
iconography of the medieval period and the global architectures of communal sites of worship.
This interplay between the aesthetics of innocence and those of arithmetical refinement mirrors the broader tensions with which Berziga works—a tightroped balance of spontaneity and control, experimentation and precision, the historied and the potential.
In recent works, geometric motifs function as organizers of intensity, so that structure and
instinct remain closely bound. These forms appear both in his paintings and frames, which are
constructed in harmony with each work’s material language. Berziga draws on the cultural
hybridity of his lived experience of China and Italy – disparate visual traditions and inherited
sensibilities meet, histories are preserved, memories refuse to settle. Painting comes into
contact with digital architectural processes and contemporary craftsmanship, as Berziga
questions how we define what feels aged, or enduring, or youthful.