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.

Wolfcamp Catalogue

See exhibition catalogue and essay (written by art historian Dr. Kevin Chua) here.

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 the 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.

Artifacts 78, 114, 111, 51, 022, pigment print front mounted on box frame, 6”x6”x3”

Strip : Wolfpup, pecos county, tx (773-07740), 2022, pigment print front mounted on box frame, 6”x6”x3”

Spill, pigment print front mounted on box frame, 6”x6”x3”

Petro Talk, 2022, pigment print front mounted on box frame, 6”x6”x3”

Petro Objects, 2022,pigment print front mounted on box frame, 6”x6”x3”