Amy Yeminne Kim

I am an artist working in photography and installation.
I use photography’s illusionistic qualities to encourage dialogue whether it be digging up what was meant to be buried or examining the image boundaries between the fake and the real.

Before my long stay as a Texas resident, I grew up in South Korea during the height of the violent democratic protests. Because of this experience, I currently examine today’s geopolitics through the lens of the oil extraction craze in West Texas. My work is informed by early thinkers of photography such as Walter Benjamin and Frederick Douglass who grappled with the promises and failures of the photographic medium. It is also informed by my background staying in sites of high tension such as post-war Korea or the boom or bust economy of the Texas oil fields. I am the winner of 2025 PH Museum Grant (3rd place). Author and artist of “Basin Recipe Cards,” published in Nourish and Resist by Yale Univ. Press. I hold a B.A. from Hankuk Univ. of Foreign Studies in South Korea, an MFA in Arts Administration from Texas Tech University Theatre and Dance, and a second MFA from Texas Tech University School of Art. I currently serve as Assistant Professor of Photography at Hope College in Holland Michigan.

C.V.

Basin Recipe Cards

The 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.

This work incorporates geology, displacement, extraction, coloniality, and sometimes gastronomy. The cards adopt an archipelagic structure in that each single card works alone as an island, yet the series of cards resemble the more open geoform of an archipelago. As an island would become a signifier in an archipelago, a recipe card acts as a signifier within the card collection.

Can anyone cook anything from these “recipe” cards? Probably not. But one can make associations between the Caribbean and the Permian Basin of Texas, between food and industry, between production and consumption, and between past and present.