And, from December 29, there will be a sculpture in Hong Kong called Shan Shui, which literally means 'mountain water'. It consists of two hills of glass united by water, and it can be found in Quarry Bay's Taikoo Place near the deeply unmagical taxi rank close to the entrance to Dorset House.

That corner was a dark and gloomy spot crying out for transformation. Swire Properties, which built Taikoo Place, thought so too.

'It was very dingy, actually a bit morbid,' says Alison Pickett, a corporate art consultant whom Swire hired to find an artist who could enliven proceedings. She, in turn, approached Lane whose work she already knew.

Lane is a 45-year-old American who has lived in England since 1975 when he arrived to study the art of stained glass. Ms Pickett sent him photographs of the Swire site which he perused in his north London studio, a place he describes (with proper regard for fairytale scene-setting) as 'a medieval foundry' and 'a madhouse'.

He made some drawings on top of the photos but it was only when he flew to Hong Kong last March that he realised the scale of the undertaking.

'I spent four hours sitting down there with a sketchbook and a camera,' he says. 'I sat there, then I went back to my hotel room and developed the photos. A lot of artists won't do commissioned pieces, but if the client is concerned and involved then I'm happy. Then it's a dialogue and you're problem-solving.' Lane's main problem was that some of the Taikoo Place buildings' services, such as fire hoses, were already built into the space and could only be moved at phenomenal cost. So he decided to incorporate the existing planter, which was disguising these unaesthetic but essential lumps, into his own design. And then the mountain fell into place.

It took 500 sheets of glass to make Shan Shui and each one was individually formed in London. (Not one piece, incidentally, was broken in transit.) Some sheets were cut by Lane and some by his team.

'It's like martial arts when you cut the glass,' he says. 'Somebody stands over it, scores it and - ker-chung - it makes a magnificent sound. It's like having a dialogue with the material. And I'm now entering my mature period.' When did that start? Lane laughs: 'Last week.' In fact, he gives the impression of a man who has been a long time in search of an artistically spiritual voice. Perhaps that was why he initially studied stained glass, that conduit of radiance which the great medieval craftsman used as a means of glorifying God. When Lane talks about two people who have greatly influenced him, for example, he uses the same word: mystic.

At London's Central School of Art, there was his teacher Cecil Collins. 'Cecil was a great mystic, he painted angels and fools,' he says. 'I mean fools in the tarot sense, that idea of vulnerability and openness. He said that art was the healing of a wound.' What is Lane's wound? 'Mortality. That feeling of being human, the gap between spirit and reason. Everybody's wounded by that.' One day, Mr Collins suggested that his pupil, who was frustrated at the way his efforts were being received by other teachers, should visit a woman called Irena Tweedie.

'She was a mystic, Russian by birth, and she would have maybe 50 people in her flat meditating on the floor. She called us the friends of God, the fools of God, the idiots of God.' Lane, aware of how this might sound, grins a little and remarks, wryly, that his first job was to design a glass balustrade for . . . McDonald's.

But it was Ms Tweedie who told him that green - like the deep green of the low-iron glass he likes to employ - has been used as a healing, spiritual colour for centuries.

'I've studied a lot of original cultures and all art has been descriptive of inward experiences. We have a huge cultural memory and art should make you homesick for that.

'It should induce a state of excruciating bliss, a beauty so beautiful that you don't know whether to die or to cry.' Working with glass, of course, there is the prospect that one might indeed die. Lane's hands, with their lattice of ghostly nicks, literally bear art's wounds. 'I don't injure myself that much. But glass is unforgiving. It's transformed by light so that it looks visually soft but it's hard and very dangerous. It's mystical.' In case this conveys a sense of an other-worldly man, the affable Lane points out that his north London studio is a bastion of testosterone with loud music pumping out of speakers (helpfully labelled 'Born To Throb'), dogs running around, and lads creating that ker-chung moment with sophisticated equipment.

It is a factory, he says, but emphatically not a soulless one. There must always be the human touch. 'Why do people like handmade things?' he muses. 'Because there's an energy and a tremble which is important. It's about the imperfection which is in each person, and about overcoming that imperfection.' Lane, who has two teenagers of his own, never read The Snow Queen as a child but he knows all about that tale of how a sliver of ice can pierce a heart. Some years ago, a production of The Snow Queen was mounted in his workshop in front of 500 people.

For the children who were there, invited for the night into his glinting kingdom, it must have felt truly like magic.