Tenzin and Chariteoke founder, James Payne.

Tenzin Dolma — Founder, Snowland Artists

Some people find their calling gradually. Kristel Ouwehand found hers at seventeen.

Born and raised in Canada, Kristel left home at an age when most of her peers were finishing high school. She had heard about a Himalayan monastery in southern India where the ancient Tibetan art of thangka painting was still being taught in its traditional form — intricate, devotional, painstaking work that had been passed down through generations of monks and artists. Something in her said go. So she went.

She spent the next ten years there. Living simply, learning deeply, immersing herself in a tradition that most of the world had never heard of. Thangka painting is not a casual pursuit — each piece can take months or years to complete, and every line, every color, every symbol carries meaning that stretches back centuries. Kristel didn’t just learn the technique. She absorbed the philosophy behind it. She learned what it means to make something with complete attention and complete humility.

She also learned something about the people who carried this tradition — young men and women from the nomadic highlands of western China, from Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan, who had grown up speaking Tibetan as their first language, who had been raised in a culture of extraordinary artistic richness, and who had very few pathways to share that richness with the wider world.

When she eventually made her way to China, she brought everything she had learned with her. In 2010 she founded Snowland Artists in the Labrang region of Gansu Province — a studio and arts residency offering young artists from disadvantaged backgrounds a structured five-year mentorship in both traditional Tibetan art forms and contemporary western painting and drawing techniques. She gave it the name Snowland because that is what the Tibetan plateau is — vast, cold, breathtaking, and full of a quiet that city people have forgotten exists.

She has been known as Tenzin Dolma ever since her years in the monastery. It is the name her teachers gave her, and the name she carries into everything she does.

The early years were not easy. Resources were scarce, recognition was slow, and the students who arrived came with talent but little else — many had lost parents, grown up in the care of relatives, or left monastic life to pursue something they couldn’t quite name yet. Tenzin fed them, housed them, taught them, and believed in them with a consistency that has quietly changed the trajectory of their lives.

In 2025, with the help of friends and supporters from around the world, Snowland Artists relocated to Lijiang in Yunnan Province — a larger studio at the same modest rent, in a city whose light and landscape have inspired artists for centuries. Everyone arrived and immediately felt the difference. The new space is four times larger. The mountains are still there. The work continues.

Today Snowland Artists is close to self-sufficient — a remarkable achievement for a privately run arts residency with no institutional backing. Tenzin’s focus for the years ahead is simple: visibility. The artists she mentors are producing work of extraordinary quality. The world just hasn’t seen it yet.

That is changing.

Snowland Artists is located in Shuhe, Lijiang, Yunnan Province, China.

Original artwork is available for purchase at snowlandart.org/shop

Instagram: @snowlandartists