I first saw this mirror in the late eighties, hanging on a column in Mokotoff Fine Arts across the street from the New Museum in New York City. Moke told me that it was smuggled out of Tibet in order to raise money for a monastery, and that it was a seventeenth or eighteenth century divination mirror used by the State Oracle of Tibet.

 When Jorge and I went to Dharamsala in 1982 to photograph the Dalai Lama, we found ourselves waiting some ten days for him to return, late, from a journey. One of many events that befell us was dinner with the State Oracle, an elderly man in his seventies. The State Oracle, whose name I have never remembered, had eyes unlike any I had seen before. It was as if his head was hollow, and fire was burning deep within the sockets. The expression "he looked right through me" is not adequate here. They were the eyes, I believe, of one who has undergone intense purification. Possibly they were also the eyes of the spirit that inhabited him.

Some years later, the Gagosian Gallery held a fund-raising exhibition to benefit Tibet House in New York. The exhibition consisted of major works by contemporary artists, but also included my precious mirror. This came at a time when I had money in my pocket, and although the price was now dramatically increased, I purchased the mirror. I wrapped it in a dark blue shawl, and I kept it hidden, as if its power would be diminished by exposing it to view.

It was only while working on the current exhibition that the relationship of this mirror to my own work became apparent to me, most directly to my mirror self-portraits of 1969. I had hidden the mirror from life, during a period in which I was preoccupied with death. But now I expose it to light again, to allow myself to see into its smoky realm of possibilities.