Finding the Room Between Sacred and Souvenir

Episode 0011: Tsherin Sherpa on bringing Thangka & the art of Nepal to the contemporary art world

Nepalese artist Tsherin Sherpa on training as a Thangka painter at 13, representing Nepal at the Venice Biennale, and his show at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Not long after arriving in California from Nepal, artist Tsherin Sherpa paid the entrance fee at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, expecting to see something new. The first thing inside the door was a large traditional Thangka painting, the exact style he had trained to paint since he was 13 years old.

For a lot of traditional and diaspora art, there’s rarely a space between a sacred object and a tourist souvenir until an institution studies it’s artistic characteristics. Those institutions that have shown respect and given value to these artforms have shaped which artists and traditions get seen, and which ones survive at all.

Sacred, souvenir, or nothing

Sherpa comes from a family of Tibetan Buddhist Thangka painters in Nepal. He’s the third generation trained in the tradition, apprenticed under his own father starting at 13. Thangkas are traditional religious paintings used for meditation, understood within the practice as a kind of map toward enlightenment.

Growing up, Sherpa saw that tradition exist in two places. Inside a monastery, where Thangkas were sacred and largely closed off from anyone outside the practice. Or in a tourist souvenir shop, where they were mass-produced by assembly lines of workers who’d each only learned one small piece of the technique.

You would see a traditional Thangka painting either in a monastery or in a souvenir shop. Nothing in between.

What changes when an institution says this is art

Sherpa’s first visit to an American museum with some student friends, was not long after he moved to California and took a job at a Buddhist center. He remembers the ten dollar entrance fee feeling like real money at the time, and his brief disappointment at seeing a painting style he’d already spent his life making himself.

What changed his mind was what came with it: thick catalogs published by Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, full of scholarship on the exact tradition his father had taught him, written by academics who had studied directly with Tibetan monks. He’d never had access to that kind of writing about his own craft, since it existed almost entirely from Western institutions.

I didn’t know what I was looking for until I actually landed at the museum. It is neither very commercial nor very inaccessible. It has its own space, and it’s also highly respected as an art form.

That museum visit gave him, for the first time, an academic and institutional frame for a tradition he’d only ever experienced as daily practice.

Who decides what earns that frame

Catherine Whitney sits on the board of the Vilcek Foundation, founded by Jan and Marica Vilcek, Czechoslovakian immigrants who came to New York in 1968. The foundation funds immigrant artists and scientists specifically, built on the belief that foreign-born individuals face a harder path in the United States than most.

As Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Whitney has thought directly about who has historically gotten to make these calls.

This traditional white male culture has really just dictated so much of how we see our own history, our own art history.

That’s part of why Whitney says she’s drawn to working with living artists now, especially women, Indigenous artists, immigrants, and artists of color whose work hasn’t had the same institutional attention as the historical, mostly male, mostly Western canon.

Building the room yourself when it doesn’t exist

Sherpa didn’t wait for an institution to build that space for him. In 2022, he became the first artist to represent Nepal at the Venice Biennale, in the country’s first-ever national pavilion, collaborating with local bronze artists, fellow Thangka painters, and carpet weavers whose traditional crafts were fading as younger generations left them behind.

Back in Kathmandu, he and his wife opened their own gallery, funded through an unusual arrangement: an artwork traded for a year’s rent, so the gallery didn’t have to depend on sales to survive. He built it because Kathmandu’s existing handful of galleries were, in his words, mostly commercially driven, showing only artists who already sold well, while roughly 120 new art school graduates a year had nowhere to show their work. Some of the traditionally trained Thangka painters he’d grown up around, he said, had left the craft altogether to drive for Uber or work in restaurants instead.

Why this matters beyond the art world

Sherpa’s story and Whitney’s work sit on opposite sides of the same gap. Sherpa wasn’t fighting to get into a category called “art.” For most of his life, that category simply didn’t seem to exist for what he did, only sacred practice on one side and tourist commerce on the other. Whitney is one of the people with real influence over building that missing middle space for artists coming up behind him now. Institutional recognition carries real weight beyond prestige. For a tradition like Thangka painting, it shapes whether the craft survives into the next generation or disappears for lack of a sustainable way to practice it.

The room Sherpa eventually found, neither temple nor souvenir shop, is still rare. Building more of them, whether that’s a museum wing, a foundation, or a gallery funded by bartered art, is what keeps traditions like his alive. You can hear the full conversations with Tsherin Sherpa in Episode 11 and Catherine Whitney in Episode 10.