Yang Jin is a Tibetan who moved to Beijing as a child. As a result, she cannot speak her native language any more. She has the face of a Bodhisattva, with thin, curved eyebrows and eyes which evoke compassion. Her cousin, An Sang, is a painter in Tibet. He paints her eyes.
Ms Yang had told me that I must seek out An when I got to Lhasa. I found him living in a quiet house in a quieter lane near the old casabas, close to Jokhang Temple. As I stared at his painting of a thousand-hand, thousand-eye Guanyin, I realised that I was actually looking at Ms Yang.
'She went to Beijing and found a good life there,' he said. 'Yes, materially Beijing has everything. But in Lhasa I have inspiration for my paintings. To leave this atmosphere would be to leave my inspiration. Lhasa is a place of spirit. I will stay here until I die. As an artist I could not find a better place. It has not yet been destroyed. It is pure. Here, you can see and feel the force of religious inspiration.
'But in China's many big cities, this has been destroyed. In Tibet, there are still people whose face is pure. A person's value is found within that person. That is the reason I must stay.'
An pointed to his painting of the young Bodhisattva. 'Guanyin has many hands to help those in difficulty. She has many eyes to see all those in need. These are my beliefs. So I paint these hands and eyes so that more people can know that many people still live in poverty, do not have enough to eat or wear, and need the help of others. If more people can help others with pure action, they will be repaid for their purity. To be human is to be pure. People's hearts are expressed through their eyes. So I paint many eyes to remind people that they should reach out with many hands.'
His paintings express a sense of solemn power through recurring images. Tibetan women covered in turquoise; thousands of hands and eyes; the unrestrained energy of white eagles. For Tibetans, white eagles carry a special symbolism - they eat the corpses at 'sky', or open-air, funerals.