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

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

Tsherin Sherpa on So Many Questions

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