Amy Yeminne Kim
I am an artist working in photography and installation. Before my long stay as a Texas resident, I grew up in South Koera during the height of often violent democratic protests. I am interested in modern day 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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Permian Ribbons
In Korean funerals, two black strips of ribbons austerely drape the photo of the deceased. At homecomings in the Permian Basin of West Texas, the football stadium becomes a sea of sumptuous heaps of ribbons by students sporting their homecoming mums.
I use ribbons to make visible a land created by petroleum extraction.
The Permian Basin stretches across 86,000 square miles of desert in West Texas. It is situated over the Wolfcamp Shale, the world’s most lucrative oil-producing formation. My series unpacks this insulated place that shoulders the colonial oil enterprises of the past century.
My work comments on oil extraction from perspectives both personal and historical. With printed paper ribbons, I borrow from the Korean funeral tradition of ornamenting the portrait of the dead. I deploy photos from field work from the Permian Basin, petroleum museum archives, and my studio.
My intention is that the viewers will feel a sense of otherness in the space, the way I encounter this convulsing territory.
Rock me, 19x23” hand crafted poplar frame, Hahnemuhle rice paper print and ribbon strip, 2026. Untitled, 19x23” hand crafted poplar frame, Hahnemuhle rice paper print and ribbon strip, 2026.Fringe me, 19x23” hand crafted poplar frame, Hahnemuhle rice paper print and ribbon strip, 2026.Specimen me, 19x23” hand crafted poplar frame, Hahnemuhle rice paper print and ribbon strip, found object rosette, 2026.Ruin me, 19x23” hand crafted poplar frame, Hahnemuhle rice paper print and ribbon strip, 2026.Sink me me, 19x23” hand crafted poplar frame, Hahnemuhle rice paper print and ribbon strip, 2026.