Continuing through January 4, 2026
Diane Ding’s, “A Cultural Platter,” and John Toki’s “Earthscapes” demonstrates a shared devotion to craft, love of family and a deep compassion for artistic communities beyond national borders. Both share in what Ding terms a “strange beauty,” interacting across media to saturate the gallery in myth and motherland memories, bolstered by their respective skills. The two artists are conjoined in a consortium of consciousness connecting artists worldwide.
Ding’s path to this mid-career survey was arduous. Arriving in San Francisco in 1993 from Harbin, northeastern China, she was stricken by homesickness and burdened with disorienting daily obligations. Adjusting to her new situation, she began a series of dual portraits titled “Secret Garden.” The series’ subjects span culture, fashion, history and mythology, and are all exquisitely rendered and intentionally shrouded in a painterly haze. There are undertones of separation and division between the figures pictured in the double portraits. For example, “Side by Side After a Passing” (2005) is drawn from a family fable about a beautiful Chinese maiden in love with a uniformed Russian officer. Ding said “I’ve always felt that old things, old stories — when placed in today’s world — become deeply contemporary in their own way. They carry weight. That feels strange and beautiful to me.”
Ding renders faces and costumes in detail before allowing them to fade into backgrounds via a series of runny drips that echo the works of Hung Liu, with whom Ding had a close friendship. Elsewhere among the thirty-nine works on view, rigorous draftsmanship falls away into a haze of both slick and painterly brushwork. In “Dragon Dance in a Chinatown Alley” (n.d.) Ding’s bicultural experience coalesces into a collision of classic Chinese illustration and American idolatry in the form of Disney’s familiar mouse. Here, she blends cultural diversity with painterly abstraction.
Family retains its central role in Ding’s current practice. “43 Years Together” (2025) cements the intermingling of souls shared with her artist husband Wanxin Zhang. Instantly recognizable, the figures engage in a mutual journey that finds full expression in “California Artists Too” (2023). Here, the dual portrait of herself and Zhang makes clear that despite diverse and challenging beginnings, we can build the life of which we dream.
If Ding’s work has grown out of displacement and memory, John Toki draws from well-established roots in the Bay Area Japanese-American community. His family’s business is Leslie Ceramics, long-time purveyors of ceramic supplies. This meant that Toki grew up around clientele and family friends such as Peter Voulkos, Stephen De Staebler, Viola Frey, Ron Nagel, Jim Melchert and others who brought ceramics to the level of fine-art sculpture “There’s something about a kiln,” Toki has remarked. “It brings people together because they need it to fire their work. I suppose this goes back to the earliest times of history, where people would get together around a fire.”
Toki carries that flame forward in works both monumental and intimate. That such variance in scale can work well aesthetically is a thesis of the current exhibition, which features eighteen examples of small-scale works, but only a single monumental sculpture, titled “Memories of the Mind” (2025), from his “Earthwork” series. It stands at sixty-seven inches. He has executed works as tall as eleven feet or more, weighing up to several tons. Many of these were fired in a traditional wood-fired anagama kiln, where flame and ash interact unpredictably with the clay, creating natural, elemental surface effects. Toki begins with ink sketches, then small studies, then advances to painstaking calibrations of clay and glaze — often discarding as much clay as he retains. The works feel ancient and timeless, yet modern at the same time.
Toki’s more intimate works range in size from eight to twenty-two inches. Some have served as maquettes for larger works, while others are perfectly suited for their intimate scale. “Stoic Stance” measures just over a foot, rigid as a stalagmite and looking just as archaic. “Twisted Landscape” is a similar sized work that branches out from a bulky base. Monumental and intimate freestanding works are joined by others mounted on the wall, including, “Laminated Earth,” which features numerous conjoined firings, various tones of dirt, dust and reflected sky.
Toki’s work invites comparison with the small-scale sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, not in terms of formal resemblance but by their shared commitment to presence, touch and existential charge. Toki’s smaller works are earmarked by attenuated bodies and rough, reworked surfaces.
Where Giacometti’s sculptures soak in postwar existential anxiety, Toki’s works are anchored in material knowledge, communal memory and the economy of use. Their forms carry the marks of the hand and the kiln with equal authority. They are not miniatures of larger ideas, but complete statements, designed for daily living in the home. His work channels a contemplative patience, a material humility, and a tactile resonance with earthly geomancy.
Given their differences, Ding and Toki are linked in numerous ways that originate with their family upbringings. Both had artistic mothers who encouraged their creativity by looking at the smallest of details with fresh eyes. Ding’s painterly approach draws on her mother’s early calligraphy instruction, while Toki’s mother ignited a significant moment for her son while explaining the abstract spirit of a teacup. The two artists’ shared outlook can be summed up in a statement made by Toki in 2021: “Where I started was one thing, but where I ended up was something else.”
