At the onset of the pandemic – do we really need to keep specifying which one – people worldwide turned toward passions and pastimes they would’ve only previously imagined. And, for an instant, it almost seemed as if the fine arts might go mainstream, finally achieving a contemporary moment. Image after image, picture-perfect recreations of Classical paintings gave social media an altogether alien though slightly familiar hue. Would fine art and whatever version of modernity we’re in now finally coalesce? Oh, how naïve we were.

But artists were well-prepared. The creative isolation their studios had always offered was now the model to be emulated. And a very discrete few – Mie Yim is a shining example – meshed the oppressiveness of fear and isolation with a relentless dedication to creation.

Her result? Amuse-bouche. Bite-size surprises, inspiring moments, flashes of the unexpected, reduced to these shared senses of urgency and immediacy right there on the page. Of course, not everything about the experience can be suppressed. Her title? Quarantine drawings, numbered. Her support? Eight-anda-half by eleven sheets of paper. Each mapping something familiar, something indeterminate, something caught between the exhausted and the urgent. And each amuse-bouche is brilliant.

Quarantine Drawing (277) may be an eye, eyelashes, and the ever-familiar patterns of nature, but it’s just as easily anthropomorphic, a quarantine companion. Add in the materiality, how one of the great beauties of pastel is how it sits on the paper – and it feels as if every image is coming alive. In many ways, she shares an uncanny ability to animate a thing, that same fragmentary approach to the body, with the late Philip Guston – viewed through a dystopian lens. These same senses are electrified in Quarantine Drawing (107), where another unidentifiable, two-eyed creation seems to collapse in on itself. The background, almost an olive drab (how apropos), pushes her imaginary subject to the foreground, leaving only emptiness behind.

Of course, by the time you arrive at Quarantine Drawing (186), you’d be forgiven if you thought Yim had brought the gloom to Gloomy Bear. It isn’t immediately clear this is the character she’s reimagining, but the idea of creatively celebrating a destructive pink anime character seems to suit the mood.

That’s the other place Yim truly excels. Somehow, whether she makes us connect directly with the abject – that’d be Quarantine Drawings (9), (99), and (187), if you’re curious – or uses the fluidity of line to mash together what looks like the Venus of Willendorf, a four-chamber heart, and a Matisse seated nude, she has this uncanny ability to connect through the familiar. It isn’t so much that her references are necessary, or even necessarily that important to know, but over the course of creating in a quarantine Yim did what few can: she used the familiar to explore and expand on the universal. And she brings you close in (remember that feeling?) to experience it.

Pause, and consider the possibility that Yim’s Quarantine Drawings are like an extended, subtle art history lesson, packed with references and multi-layered meanings, all bounded by a standard-size sheet of paper. There could be a single drawing, or a hundred, and the result would be the same. Somehow, on such an intimate scale, Yim exposes fragments of the vast, shared expanse of hopes, dreams, fears. Or, much more simply, a small bite of the human condition.