Tsherin Sherpa on bringing Thangka painting & the art of Nepal to the contemporary art world

Nepalese artist Tsherin Sherpa trained as a traditional Tibetan Thangka painter from age 13, learning from his father in a lineage three generations deep, and now uses that sacred visual language to make contemporary art about migration and identity. He represented Nepal at the Venice Biennale in 2022, in the country's first-ever pavilion.

Tsherin talks about the five years of repetition that made the forms second nature, escaping to Taiwan on a computer science scholarship, and moving to California in 1998, where a residency at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco led to an unlikely Jamba Juice ad campaign built on a Thangka composition. He explains what changed when he found Harvard, Yale and Oxford catalogs about his own tradition, why butterflies run through his paintings, and why he now collaborates with bronze artists and carpet weavers in Kathmandu to keep those crafts from disappearing.

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