The other artist featured in PEM’s exhibition also discovered his art practice through leaving his homeland. Robert Beer hitchhiked from his native Wales to India in 1970 as a young man and spent the next six years traveling across India and Nepal, learning from artists including the Tibetan painter Lhasa Jampa. Over the next several decades, he would produce thousands of detailed line drawings, culminating in the world-renowned book The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs.

Despite his lifelong dedication to its art forms, Beer came into Buddhist painting from a technical rather than a spiritual angle. “I was more fascinated in the process of thangka painting, painting the deities and learning through that rather than studying the teachings… It was more to understand the iconography and how these figures were represented,” he says.

Thangka painting is a devotional art of complex compositions and precise shape and color symbolism. Often painted on silk or canvas, but sometimes embroidered, these paintings are created for instruction, display or private meditation. They depict different forms of the Buddha, bodhisattvas (venerated spiritual figures), protective spirits and wrathful deities.

In traditional thangka painting, sacred figures are drawn with precision. “Tibetan art follows a system of strict gridlines for determining proportions of deities based on measurements of finger widths, or sor,” explains Beer. Buddhas are the tallest, followed by bodhisattvas, humans and other figures. Each chakra, the body centers spaced from the feet to the crown of the head, is divided by a measurement of one palm, 12.5 sor.

The grids that guide these measurements are visible in several of Beer’s works, such as Grid Drawing of Thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara, where a depiction of the Buddha stretches out hundreds of limbs in precise angles. In some of Sherpa’s works, his figures explode out of these grid lines, or crouch cheekily in front of them. Sherpa and Beer also both depict mudras, or ritual hand gestures and poses.

“My work is very precise, iconographically correct. Measurements are correct,” says Beer. “Finger widths are correct. Everything is as it should be. Everything is as it should be in Tsherin's work, but it's also everything as it could be… It's echoing on another resonance...Almost like you have to pay homage to the whole tradition…. It's a process of self-identification.”

Sherpa is likewise “a huge admirer of Robert Beer's work” after seeing his fellow artist’s books and works in Buddhist centers around the world. “Someone from the West, someone from England, who's taking this tradition forward – it's fantastic,” he says. “It shows it’s a two-way street.”

He compares traditional representations such as Beer’s work to the root of an artistic tree. South Asian contemporary works like his own form the branches, “[stemming] out of these practices, these skills, these techniques…the tradition,” he says.