Amy Yeminne Kim
I am an artist working in photography and installation. I focus on post-colonial geopolitics through the lens of the oil extraction craze in West Texas. My work is informed by photo history and theory, the promises and failures of the photographic medium, and my shifting identities as a Korean and as an American. 2025 PH Museum Grant 3rd place. Author and artist of “Basin Recipe Cards,” Nourish and Resist, Yale Univ. Press. 2024.
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Rock me, hand crafted poplar frame, archival pigment ribbons and print on Hahnemuhle rice paper, 23x16”, 2026.
Permian Ribbons
The Korean funerary photography is distinguished for its ornamented frame; two strips of black ribbon cutting across the top left and right corners of the picture. Displayed at visitations, the image is then hand carried by a male authority of the family and leads the funeral procession. This distinct form, in addition to honoring the deceased, was adapted by modern Asian states to assert their statehood.
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API Gravity, hand crafted maple frame, metallic print front mount, 6x6x3”, 2023.Wolfcamp Catalogue
The Permian Basin stretches across 86,000 square miles of desert in west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Far below this vast emptiness lies the site of my ongoing photographic project—the Wolfcamp Shale—the world’s most lucrative oil producing formation. With an anthropological eye, my project brings into focus the rise of American nationalism, the colonial history of oil extraction, deal-makings, labor relations, post-colonial ripples, and the prehistoric geology of the carbon bearing Wolfcamp Shale. My square box frames, taking photographs every three miles across U.S. Interstate I-20, and the utilization of playwriting, are examples of the structuralist approach I use to reshape this unflinching universe, conspicuously imperial as it is vulnerably human.
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Basin Recipe Cards
“Basin Recipe Cards” is a photo series and article published in Nourish and Resist, Yale Univ. Press. 2024. CaribBasin Recipe Cards bring together geographical regions, inquiry into the medium of photography, and a joy of cooking, all in a series of recipe cards. With these cards, I activate a space that finds Caribbean presence within the carbon bearing oil fields of the Permian Basin of Texas. The cards are designed as a boxed set of four-by-six-inch printed and archivable photographic cards.
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Photo Expo
Photo Expo (2019) renders visible the ideas I present in the Fake News chapter. An on-going web- and installation-based project, the work borrows aesthetics from commercial expositions. Here, photos are less documentative and more bodily. I present Photo Expo in a manner accessible for all with installations meant to be interactive, experiential, and entertaining. Viewers, for instance, can walk on the images, eat the images printed on an Expo Cake, or see themselves in the video and projection live feed. Photo Expo asks us to experience photography. The exhibition was conceived as my MFA thesis exhibition in 2018 funded by two competitive fellowships totaling $5,000. It has since been exhibited at the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier gallery at UT Permian Basin
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No Windows
This project was made partly in response to Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation and my questions about meaning in an art piece. I was becoming more interested in how we perceive than the hermeneutics in a formal analysis. This inquiry into perception developed into a broader survey into how we experience the photographic medium. No Windows (2017)resulted from this line of questioning. The images were taken in my studio in Slaton, TX as I shot nine hundred images quickly and intuitively.
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Suspension of Disbelief
Suspension of Disbelief (2015-2017), draws parallels between our viewing experience of staged theatre and the visual experience of illusion. I enjoy playing with multiple facets of photography, and I want my works to encourage the viewers to share in this pleasure--Is this straightforward or manipulated? Document or art? A photographic experience, as I see it is like biting into a piece of cake. I want us to see, savor, swallow, smile from our consumption, be it embodied, experiential, quick or, over-indulging.
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