Tsherin Sherpa, whose artwork is featured in the current CU Art Museum Anonymous: Contemporary Tibetan Art exhibition, will give a public lecture at CU on Tuesday, February 24.
Born in 1968 in Kathmandu, Nepal, Tsherin Sherpa studied traditional Tibetan painting methods from the age of 12 under his father, Master Urgen Dorje, a renowned thangka artist from Ngyalam, Tibet. Sherpa moved to Taiwan in 1988 to study Mandarin and Computer Science. Three years later, he returned to Nepal working along with his father in numerous painting projects. In 1998 he moved to the USA working as a thangka artist and as instructor at several Tibetan Buddhist Centers in California.
Tsherin Sherpa has, in recent years, shifted away from traditional subjects to depict more contemporary concerns. His precise and immaculate paintings of Tibetan spirits and deities are explorations of the detachment experienced by the Tibetan Diaspora in relation to their homeland.
Tsherin Sherpa's artist statement:
"My works have always been an attempt to merge the gap between sacred and secular, icon and ordinary and past history and contemporary. As nomadic people, we Tibetans seem to possess the ability to adapt into many different environments. As our culture merges with others, I'm curious how we will maintain and celebrate our unique essence at the same time it is evolving. These personal experiences are explored through the use of my Protector series.
"I take the classical images of Tibetan deity and manipulate their form to create an abstract form that carry over this sense of groundlessness.
"In traditional Tibetan painting a formal grid system is used for the placement of a deity’s body in the correct posture. Without that grid tradition, the protectors almost appear to be lost in a swirling vortex, trying to find their new form. Through this process the chaos begins to subside to be transformed into somewhat abstract or an unfamiliar form."
To find out more about Anonymous, please visit http://www.contemporarytibetanart.org/.
The public lecture will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Visual Arts Center (VAC) room 1B20.