When two roads meet in Tokyo, a curved mirror will be there to oversee the union. A tool of traffic management, a convex, reflective surface gives those passing through a peek at who or what may be occulted by a tight corner. It’s a practical solution for keeping people moving smoothly through the city’s narrow streets. Mounted on utility poles, bolted to walls, and perched gargoyle-like on ledges and trusses; the mirrors are ubiquitous, a recurring motif in the texture of a neighborhood. As with most mundane infrastructures, they often go unnoticed—a feat for an object so often looked at.

The mirror is present for our safety. In the physical world, intersecting paths invite potential collisions, collisions potentially avoided by supplementing our natural line of sight with unnatural angles. Though, what of the supernatural? Crossroads, after all, are spiritually fraught topographies. Crossroads are where devils offer deals to wayward bluesmen, where vampires waylay nighttime travelers, and where ghostly black dogs bear their ill omens. Convenient then, that a few traditions ascribe convex mirrors the power to dispel malevolent forces. In France, the oeil de sorcière—the witch’s eye—is hung in homes as metaphysical protection, its unblinking gaze warding off wicked energy.

Le Miroir courbe, a poem by Yves Bonnefoy, sets its scene in familiar territory: "Look at them down there, at that crossroads, / They seem to hesitate, then go on." As these tentative subjects tarry, picking flowers from the berm, an angelic observer hovers above, cradling a familiar object. "It looks like he is holding a mirror, and the earth / is reflected in the water of this other shore / And what is he pointing to now / pointing to a place in this image?/ Is it another house or another world?" No protection here; instead an uncertain folding of in and outs. 

Contained within a traffic mirror’s firmament are worlds distinct from our own. The content is similar—all the details pulled from the immediate environs—but the composition is governed by novel, funhouse physics. Each element is bowed in accordance with the mirror’s geometry and the viewer’s angle of observation. Look dead-on and the distortions are subtle at the center with dramatically stark warping toward the edges. A figure moving across the frame shape shifts throughout the journey: they enter the world ill-defined, take sensible form by the midpoint, and, upon exit, smear as abstraction once again. A full life lived in seconds.   

In the 18th century, the countryside became a fashionable destination for young aesthetes chafed by the dreary realities of England’s industrializing cities. Moved by the frothy currents of Romanticism, many ventured to the Lake District seeking some glimpse of a bucolic idyll. If the natural vistas proved to be insufficiently sublime, there was an easy fix: simply turn away from the terrain and view the scene with Claude glass. This tinted, convex mirror was said to produce a rich, dreamy reflection that evoked the transcendent landscapes of French painter Claude Lorrain, whose canvases adorned wealthy parlours, back in the city. 

The Arnolfini Portrait, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434, is lauded for its precocious technique. The work’s careful perspective and gentle, diffuse light are already stunning for the time, but van Eyck, as if boasting, pushes further, rendering the whole scene once more, this time transposed, in miniature, within the frame of a curved mirror placed at the room’s back wall. The nested image holds a surprise for those who look closely: two more figures, one possibly the artist himself, the other, maybe you, the viewer. According to some, you serve as legal witnesses to the couple’s marriage ceremony.

Six centuries after van Eyck, Jeff Koons unveils the first of his Balloon Dog series. A frivolous novelty rendered at monumental scale in immaculate, polished steel, the dog is a literal mirror, and a figurative one. With its reflective sheen and obscene, suggestive curves, it’s all surface—a sly reflection of an art world increasingly obsessed with shallow spectacle and inflating values. Later, a clumsy dealer knocks a ceramic edition off its pedestal to shatter on a gallery floor. Traditionally, a broken mirror brings seven years’ bad luck—at least this time, the curse is accompanied by a six-figure insurance pay out.

Some curved mirrors are meant to secure fortunes, or at least, keep small sums from walking out the door. Around the world, mirrors are strategically arrayed around bodegas, konbini, and other small shops to help solo shopkeepers keep an eye out for the klepto-curious. This analog surveillance system is meant to deter patrons from pocketing a treat, but a similar setup was once useful for aspiring socialites. A wall-mounted host mirror let anxious entertainers watch over their ballroom parties, helping them track who mingled with whom. The goal: spotting potentially awkward interactions and preventing faux-pas before they come to pass. 

You can’t look into the world’s largest curved mirror; it’s kept hidden away at the top of Cerro Armazones, a dry, red peak in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Part of the appropriately named Extremely Large Telescope, the lens spans more than four meters in diameter and is designed to play a supporting role in collecting and containing faint light from the farthest reaches of the universe. Distant galaxies, exoplanets, and the glow of black hole accretion discs; it won’t see the sights directly, only as reflected from the seven hundred and ninety eight primary mirrors arrayed below it. 

Back in Tokyo, all is not optically optimized. For every few dozen mirrors dutifully reflecting commotion on the street, one or two turn astray. Blessed by sloppy placement or a lucky strike, these defectors sit askew at such an angle to only catch the open sky. Emptied of terrestrial concerns, the surface is nothing but color—aleatoric hues, shifting by the hour and atmospheric conditions. Sometimes, a steady pantone blue, at others, awash with sunset gradients. In a city packed with flashing neons, monumental LCDs, and beset with general visual chaos, these idle tools are a small reprieve for tired eyes.