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

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In this episode, Kendall talks with Tsherin Sherpa, a Nepalese artist who takes the visual language of Tibetan Buddhist Thangka painting and points it at contemporary subjects. His work is on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art through January 2027, and travels to the Seattle Asian Art Museum as Divine Disruption: The Art of Tsherin Sherpa, opening March 4, 2027.

Tsherin is a third-generation Thangka painter, trained by his father from the age of 13 in a form built on repetition and religious iconography. A scholarship took him to Taiwan to study computer science, mostly as an escape, and he came back to assist on monastery murals before moving to California in 1998. Residency work, a Jamba Juice ad campaign built on a Thangka composition, and exhibitions of contemporary Chinese and South Asian art showed him artists using inherited techniques to talk about identity and politics. His own paintings took on a recurring spirit figure drawn from his grandmother’s stories about spirits who follow people when they migrate, along with butterflies, which appear nowhere in traditional Thangka painting and which he ties to a lifelong instinct to change form and blend in.

In 2022 he represented Nepal at the Venice Biennale, in the country’s first pavilion, built as a collaboration with a bronze artist, other Thangka painters, and carpet weavers. He now works with a team of fifteen artist assistants and apprentices and trains them across the whole craft. In 2023 he and his wife opened a gallery space in Kathmandu to give artists a place to show their work. He exhibits at The Armory Show in New York starting in September 2026.