Ry 來 An 苑 Ry An died, briefly, when he was 23 & claimed to have had an out of body experience in the process. He left the United States shortly after, spending the next 11 years traveling throughout Japan, painting nearly 1,000 landscapes “en plein air”. He lived alone in rural, coastal, & mountainous areas with limited social interaction. His paintings from this time period tried to draw attention to both: this sense of isolation and, “a stillness of time”. There were earthquakes, landslides, large flea-ridden rats, systemic racism… His apartment was robbed by the Chinese Mafia. He was briefly the "mascot" for a local Yakuza boss. He caught on fire in an unheated apartment & was hit by cars while cycling - 5 times, the 4th time inducing a bout of temporary amnesia. Soon after agreeing to marry a former Japanese teacher, she became abusive. He painted outside the house as much as he could but, ultimately, decided to leave Japan when she repeatedly threatened to/ attempted to kill him (& his cat). He returned to the United States in 2012 to escape these escalating abuses & to work on an MFA in Illustration, hoping to add a more explicitly narrative element to his art. He then spent 10-12 hours a day over the following 3 years at a desk in near solitude. In 2014, he met a woman whom he fell fabulously in love with, but she also had an abusive ex. One night, while Ry An was working on an illustration assignment in his own home, she was nearly murdered in hers: ”blood and broken glass everywhere!” She seemed to go insane and vanished soon after. Ry An had been performing in the top 20% of his MFA classes, but struggled to complete the program – associating illustrations and narrative art, circumstantially, with the bloodshed and loss of a loved one he had witnessed. After months of producing no work at all, he learned to make sculptures from discarded paper, these being far enough removed from two-dimensional art to not trigger the same psychological stresses. While he frequently focuses on these sculptures now, he is also working on an extended series of paintings that portray the sculpted characters in ‘fraught narrative settings’ acting out allegorical scenes from his life.