Painted on scrolls, alive with cosmic energies revealed in the shapes (say) of ferocious spirit bodies, thangkas are the Buddhist icons of the Himalayas. As an eight year old in Kathmandu, Tsherin Sherpa had a hard time at school. But his father, a Tibetan master of the thangka, sensed in the boy’s meticulous copies of popular posters a talent for his own rigorously codified, technically exacting art. Thus began Tsherin’s long, steep climb to mastery in that ancient tradition. But comic-book adaptations of action-packed Hindu epics like the Ramayana thrilled his young mind, too. Later, he began assimilating the pop culture of San Francisco and the Bay Area as well. How this wide-eyed wanderer from afar fetched up in California will make an enchanting documentary someday. For now, suffice it to say that a commission out of the blue to design posters for Jamba Juice’s new product line Enlightened Smoothies had him playing in another league. Yet the aesthetic principles passed down from his father have never left him. By 2022, when Sherpa had reached his early 50s, his boldly colored, often carnivalesque flights of fancy anchored Nepal’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. “I wonder,” the artist has said. “If all the people in the valley left to go somewhere else, would the spirits follow? And if they do, how do they readjust in the new environment?” The works on view in the show “Divine Disruptions” find him answering those questions from his bridge between worlds. —Matthew Gurewitsch