Level of Appreciation
- Diamond Zhou
- Jul 18
- 11 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
Juy 18th, 2026
By Diamond Zhou
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
I have been thinking about this passage this week ever since it came up in a conversation with our friend. At first the quote seems to suggest a kind of limitation: that when we read, we are never truly leaving ourselves, that everything we encounter must first pass through the boundaries of what we already know, what we have experienced, and what we are capable of understanding. We read a book with the intelligence, emotional range, prejudices, memories and knowledge we possess at that particular moment in our lives. The same sentence may seem profound to one person, yet oblivious to another; something that leaves us entirely unmoved at twenty may devastate us at forty. Yet Proust's metaphor of the optical instrument complicates this idea beautifully. The book does not simply reflect the person who opened it, it gives that person a lens through which something previously invisible might suddenly come into focus.
Perhaps this is why I find returning to a book after ten or twenty years can be such a disorienting experience. The words have remained exactly the same, yet the book seems to have changed. A character we once admired now seems selfish; an episode we barely noticed becomes unbearable; an idea we thought we understood reveals an entirely different depth; an ending we previously imagined as romantic turned out to be a cruel sort of commitment. The work has not grown older, but its reader has, accumulating experience, knowledge, disappointment, love, grief and doubt, all of which we bring to the page. We read through who we are, but reading itself participates in making us into someone else, so that the next book is met by a slightly altered reader.
Art, surely, works in much the same way. We do not enter a gallery devoid of history and stand before an object with a perfectly neutral eye. We carry an enormous private archive with us, much of it conscious and much of it not, and what becomes visible depends partly upon what we have already learned to recognize. Yet the encounter should not end there, because an artwork can also disturb the limits of our recognition, exposing assumptions we did not know we possessed or make tangible something we had felt without ever being able to name. We may begin by seeing through ourselves, but the most enduring encounters with art can slowly enlarge the self through which we see.
Mary Cassatt's In the Loge makes this act of looking unusually visible. A woman raises her opera glasses toward something beyond the painting, absorbed in her own observation, while across the theatre a man directs his glasses towards her. She looks; he looks at her; we look at both of them. Cassatt turns spectatorship itself into the subject, constructing a social space in which seeing is inseparable from one's position within it. We may initially encounter an elegant scene of modern life, but looking at it closely, the painting becomes an arrangement of competing gazes, each carrying a different degree of freedom, curiosity and vulnerability. The longer we look, the more conscious we become of the act of “looking” itself.
Diego Velázquez takes this curious phenomenon further in Las Meninas, where the viewer is given a position without ever being entirely certain what that position is. The painter looks outward, members of the royal household appear interrupted by something beyond the canvas, and the king and queen exist only as reflections in a distant mirror. The painting has generated centuries of interpretation precisely because its complex construction refuses to be in a single, comfortable account of who is seeing whom. Greater knowledge does not always bring us closer to a final answer; sometimes it allows us to understand more precisely why an answer remains elusive. Perhaps the cultivated viewer is not necessarily the person who explains a work most quickly, but the person who has learned how to remain within uncertainty.
There is a Chinese phrase 欣赏水平 that I have always found difficult to translate adequately into English, it literally translates to “level of appreciation”. The English translation feels strangely clinical, while “taste” comes burdened with histories of class and social distinction, and “visual literacy” describes something more technical than emotional. The Chinese expression allows for an idea that contemporary culture sometimes approaches nervously: that our capacity to appreciate something can be developed, that we may become more perceptive through exposure, knowledge and attention, and that we are not necessarily equally prepared for every encounter at every point in our lives.
This can sound elitist if it is understood as a permanent hierarchy in which certain people possess superior taste and others do not. I think that interpretation misses what is most interesting about the idea. Our “level of appreciation” [欣赏水平] is not fixed, it changes as we change. Someone can know very little about contemporary art and possess an extraordinary sensitivity to music; another person may understand Renaissance painting intimately and remain completely perplexed by conceptual art. Even within a single person's life, the ability to perceive can move in unexpected directions. We learn to notice distinctions we once passed over. We become interested in things that previously bored us. Sometimes we lose interest in what once fascinated us, not because it has suddenly become inferior, but because our questions have changed.
A collector friend once told us that the art she collects now is very different from what she bought when she was younger. Over the years she had seen more, learned more, and understood more about art, but she had also come to understand more about herself. Her collection changed accordingly.
This describes something I see repeatedly in the art world, and something that is rarely acknowledged when we speak about collecting as though “taste” arrives fully formed. A collection may begin with instinct, attraction or familiarity. The new collector might be drawn towards a particular kind of beauty, a subject that feels personally recognisable, or work that fits comfortably within the visual world she already inhabits. Then she visits exhibitions, meets artists, reads, travels, looks at museum collections, lives with the works she owns, occasionally grows tired of some of them and becomes unable to stop thinking about others. Gradually, what she is looking for becomes more specific.
The collection begins to change because the collector has changed.
Works may be sold, gifted or donated; others move into storage while new acquisitions take their place. A collection that once ranged widely may become focused, or one that began cautiously may become increasingly adventurous. A collector may begin to seek works with greater historical importance, pursue one artist in depth, turn towards another period entirely, or discover that what she once considered too difficult has become precisely what she wants to live with. These changes are not necessarily evidence that the earlier collection was misguided, they are evidence that taste has a history.
In this sense, a collection can become an unusual form of autobiography. Not because every artwork reveals something obvious about the person who owns it, but because the sequence of decisions records a changing consciousness: what attracted us, what challenged us, what we eventually outgrew, what we could not afford to lose, and what we were finally prepared to understand and accept. The empty spaces left by works that have departed may belong to that history as much as the objects that remain.
Perhaps this is “level of appreciation” [欣赏水平] in its most tangible form. Appreciation does not simply deepen our understanding of the objects already before us, It can change what we seek.
Consider Guo Xi's Early Spring of 1072. For a viewer whose understanding of pictorial space has been formed primarily through European traditions of linear perspective, the monumental landscape offers a very different way of entering an image. Rather than organizing space around a single fixed viewpoint and a distant vanishing point, the composition unfolds vertically: forms nearest to the viewer occupy the lower reaches of the painting, while the eye is gradually drawn upward and deeper into the landscape. We travel through rising mountains, mist, water, pathways and traces of human habitation, encountering the scene from shifting distances rather than remaining anchored in one stable position. To encounter a visual tradition different from our own is also to recognize that what we once considered “natural” vision may itself have been learned. We do not merely acquire another image to admire; we become conscious of the conventions that have quietly shaped the way we expect an image to be seen. Early Spring has remained one of the canonical works of Northern Song Dynasty landscape painting for centuries, yet every new viewer must still learn how to travel through it.
Yet knowledge is not the only route into art. Bridget Riley's Current acts upon the body first, without the intervention of the intellect. Its hand-painted black and white lines appear to vibrate and produce an illusion of movement and depth, creating a disturbance in the perceptual space between painting and spectator. We do not need to understand the history of Op art in order to experience the instability of the image. The eye responds first and knowledge arrives afterward and helps us understand how that sensation has been constructed. There are moments when the body perceives before language can articulate.
Hilma af Klint's The Ten Largest offers almost the reverse situation. Encountered without context, the works can be absorbed through its extraordinary scale, colour and abundance of circles, spirals, letters and organic forms. Learning that this body of works belongs to a sequence devoted to the stages of human life, moving through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age, reorganises what was already visible. Forms that appeared primarily decorative begin to suggest growth, biology, sexuality, spirituality and transformation. Learning more about the work does not diminish our initial response to it; instead, it adds new layers of meaning and gives us more to see, think about and understand.
Lorna Simpson makes this relationship between seeing and knowing more explicit in Untitled (2 Necklines). Two closely cropped photographs flank a vertical series of engraved words that move through associations including “ring,” “lasso,” “noose,” “halo,” “cuffs” and “collar.” The photographs themselves remain unchanged, yet the act of reading alters the visual experience, as a fragment of the body becomes increasingly charged by intimacy, restraint, ornament and histories of violence. Simpson exposes how rarely looking occurs without language and memory, and how meanings can exist within an image that not every viewer is equally prepared, or perhaps equally willing, to recognize.
Roni Horn's You Are the Weather makes this projection even more elusive. Across one hundred photographs, the same woman appears immersed in Icelandic hot springs, her face changing subtly from image to image as light, expression and atmosphere shift. We begin assigning feelings to differences that are almost imperceptible, deciding that she appears distant, irritated, amused, vulnerable or suspicious, while gradually becoming conscious of how much of that emotional narrative may originate with us. The title turns the encounter back towards the viewer. Perhaps we are the weather passing across the face we believe we are interpreting.
There is, of course, a danger in all this talk of cultivated appreciation, because education can produce blindness of its own. The experienced viewer can become efficient where she should remain curious, quickly identifying movements, references and theories while forgetting to stay with the object itself. Expertise can sharpen perception, but it can also encourage premature certainty. A person who knows less may misunderstand something, yet may also notice what familiarity has taught the expert to overlook. Our “level of appreciation” therefore cannot simply mean accumulating information. It must include emotional range, attentiveness, intellectual flexibility and the willingness to encounter something for which one's existing knowledge is inadequate.
Perhaps, then, we really do read ourselves when we read books, and see ourselves when we look at art, but the self doing the reading and the looking is never finished. Every serious encounter contributes something to the next. A painting teaches us to notice a colour we begin seeing elsewhere; a novel gives language to an emotion we had previously experienced without being able to name; an artwork that once appeared empty teaches us, years later, that silence and absence are not the same thing. Even the works we dislike can become part of this education, forcing us to distinguish between immediate resistance and considered judgement, between something we simply do not enjoy and something we have not yet learned how to approach.
The deepest form of “level of appreciation” may therefore have less to do with knowing the greatest number of things than with developing a greater capacity to receive them. We become better viewers not simply because we can explain more, but because more becomes visible to us, such as distinctions we once overlooked, histories we did not know were present, emotions we were previously unable to recognise, and forms of experience for which we had not yet developed a language.
This may be what our collector friend's changing collection ultimately reveals. The works we choose at one moment in our lives are not necessarily the works we will choose forever, because appreciation is not a destination we arrive at and then possess. It is a continuous adjustment between what we know, what we feel, what we have experienced and what we remain willing to encounter. To look seriously over a lifetime is to accept that our own vision will change, and that some of the most valuable encounters may be with works we were not ready for when we first saw them.
We begin every encounter within the boundaries of the person we already are. Art, at its best, quietly moves those boundaries. And when we return, whether to the same painting, the same book, or simply to the world around us, we bring with us a slightly different person, capable, perhaps, of seeing something that was there all along.
David Spriggs
Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York
20 Jun 2026 – 22 Aug 2026
Arsenal Contemporary New York presents a selection of works by David Spriggs, coinciding with the artist’s inclusion in the current Iris van Herpen exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Bringing together works that explore atmosphere, space, and immaterial form, the exhibition highlights Spriggs’s long-standing investigation into the ways images can become spatial experiences.
UPCOMING EDWARD BURTYNSKY FILM SCREENINGS
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
Wednesday, July 29th
WATERMARK
Wednesday, August 5th
ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH
Wednesday, August 12th
CURRENT EXHIBITION
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