Tsherin Sherpa’s breakup with traditional thangka art results in distinctive modern icons.

There’s no other way around it – Tsherin Sherpa is an iconographer. He was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, and trained in traditional Tibetan painting by his father, thangka artist Master Urgen Dorje Sherpa. He is also someone who rebelled against this sacred tradition, mastering it and then repurposing its imagery and methodology for the sake of his own acutely contemporary art.

“Around 2008-2009, I started to produce work that could be exhibited,” Sherpa says, modestly, of his trajectory. “Before that I was too shy.”

The exhibit, "Tsherin Sherpa: Different Worlds" is now on display at the Monterey Museum of Art, is his first solo exhibit in California. That’s thanks to the museum’s executive director, Corey Madden, who saw Sherpa’s work in New York and invited him here.

Sherpa’s father started training him in deity paintings when he was 12 years old. But following the lines was not enough.

“Traditional art [in Nepal] became too commodified at some point,” he says about mass-manufactured souvenirs that replaced authentically made local art. “Also, those artists had no respect anymore in the community.”

So Sherpa left for the U.S., where he was hired to paint traditional Buddhist paintings, and started exploring “knowledge, art, techniques, and began combining it all together,” he says. “Maybe if I still lived in Nepal I wouldn’t have had the courage.”

Courageous is a good word to describe the modern icons Sherpa creates.

“I start with the figure,” he says about a piece titled “Baby Spirit.” “Then comes the story. So here we have a child-spirit thinking about transformation,” he says about a curious toddler crawling on the shimmering gold and silver background. There are butterflies flying above the child-spirit’s head – a symbol of curiosity. “The Rubik’s Cube represents choice,” Sherpa says, adding that it was among his favorite toys as a child.

The pieces gathered at MMA come from private collections in the Bay Area, where Sherpa has been living part time since 1998. There are also a couple of carpets – another tradition of the Tibetan people. Since his success in the U.S., Sherpa goes back to Nepal every year to collaborate with various local artists and promote Tibetan arts and crafts.

Tsherin Sherpa: Different Worlds is on display Thursday-Sunday until Nov. 26. Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. $15. 372-5477, montereyart.org.

This story was modified on Thursday, Sept. 14 to include the correct title of the exhibit.