Chin Sooyoung (진수영) is a pianist, organist, composer and arranger who was born on September 28, 1989 and works in the Korean jazz and independent music scenes. His albums and the Discogs and Apple Music listings bill him Chin Sooyoung. The sleeve of the 2023 EP everland and his score credit for an exhibition print the name in Western order as Sooyoung Chin, and the Budapest Music Center spells it Chin Soo Young. His birthplace is not published in any source found.

His Korean basis is a matter of upbringing, career and public record. The notes to his first album say he studied jazz theory in Korea with Lee Pan-geun and took the grand prize at a national music competition run by Jaeneung University before going to the United States in his teens. His later career has been in Seoul: Korean press places him in the Hongdae independent club scene, and Melon and Bugs list him as a South Korean solo artist. Melon gives his birth date as September 28, 1989, and Melon, Bugs and MusicBrainz all list him as male. The Korean press pieces that were read avoid gendered pronouns, while the English-language Budapest Music Center and Hungary Today pages both write "he".

In New York he enrolled in The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he majored in piano and met the bassist Choi Gwang-mun (최광문). He later took a master's degree in composition at Queens College of the City University of New York, and Hungarian sources describe it as a degree from the CUNY graduate school. By 2012 the notes to his first album had him leading a quartet in Manhattan and starting to be known as a composer and big band arranger.

That first album, Original Intension, came out on July 18, 2012 under the names of Choi Gwang-mun and Chin Sooyoung. It holds seven original pieces by the two of them, in settings that include a bass solo, piano and bass duos and a trio with the drummer Kim Chaek. According to the album notes, it was recorded in a single day during the previous winter, after Kim Chaek proposed the session on a visit to New York. The notes also say Kim Chaek had won a Korean Music Award for his duo recording The Methodologies with the multi-instrumentalist Jung Jae-il. Melon's biography says the album was released in the United States and Korea at the same time.

His first big band recording followed on June 18, 2015. The Fables, credited to his jazz orchestra (진수영 재즈오케스트라), holds six programmatic pieces, each a fable about a creature met on an imagined walk through a forest: "The Language of Flowers," "Jasmine," "Gastornis," "Mad Rabbit's Waltz," "A Dance of Shadows" and "After Dark, All Cats Are Leopards." The Korean label text describes the orchestra as players he had met over ten years in the New York jazz scene and calls the writing a modern jazz vocabulary built on early jazz tradition. Melon lists the album with the distributor Digital Records.

From 2017 he appears again and again on Korean records, most often those of the saxophonist Kim Oki. Discogs credits his piano on Peace to Our Soul (streamed in November 2017), his piano and arrangements on Public Domain for Me (April 2018), the muted piano on Saturn Meditation (November 2018), composing, arranging and muted piano on Spirit Advance Unit (2019), piano and composing credit on For My Angel (January 2020), piano, composing and arranging on Yun Hyong-keun (released on streaming services in September 2020), and piano on the live album 하나의 사건 (2021) and on Everytime (2021). He is also the pianist on the 2020 album Self Ethnography by The South Korean Rhythm Kings, a free-improvisation quartet with Kim Oki, the double bassist Song Nam-hyun, the drummer Kim Chaek and the clarinetist and vocalist Pyo Jin-ho, and he arranged and played piano on the band Hippy Was Gipsy's 2019 album 불. Melon also lists him as the pianist of Fucking Madness, Kim Oki's large ensemble, whose Big Picture was released on May 23, 2020.

Another long-running group is Teho, a free-improvisation quartet formed by the guitarist Lee Tae-hun and the drummer Min Sang-yong. The saxophonist Kim Seong-wan joined for the group's fourth concert and Chin Sooyoung for its sixth. Teho1, released on August 20, 2020, was edited down from free improvisations recorded across ten concerts between June 2019 and March 2020, and the label text adds that the London-based online station Worldwide FM broadcast live recordings of the group, and that the DJ Soulscape called the group an enigmatic free-jazz jam group. Melon lists Teho2, Teho3, Teho4, Pierrot le Fumeur and Teho6 (June 9, 2025) under his name as well.

His own piano records are quiet and close. Night, Water Light (밤, 물 빛), released on May 11, 2020, has eight pieces for muted piano with Kim Oki on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet and the double bassist Jeong Su-min (정수민). It was produced by Chin Sooyoung, recorded at Mono Stereo and Blue & Red Studio and issued on vinyl, with a painted collage cover made by Choi Kyung-ju of the design studio Artistproof; Design magazine wrote about the sleeve in June 2020. Paraphrase followed on September 28, 2021, with eight pieces for muted piano and organ played by himself: "Standstill," "Years Ended in Minutes," "Without the Dark, We'd Never See the Stars," "Dreamcatcher," "When I Grab the Sunset Over Your Shoulder," "Scattered," "Tip of Your Nose" and "Weep, Sleep." It was recorded at Cheonghong Studio by Lee Seong-rok and mixed and mastered by Aepmah, and a limited vinyl edition is dated January 22, 2022 on Discogs. The critic Seo Jeong-min-gap reviewed it in Minjung Sori on November 24, 2021.

Art galleries and exhibitions became a second line of work. For the retrospective of the photographer Saul Leiter at the Seoul art space piknic, he wrote the music for the show and released three pieces on March 17, 2022, "Self-Portrait," "Red Umbrella" and "Happy Foolishness," under the title Through the Blurry Window. In early spring 2024 he scored an exhibition by the artist Son Jungkee, "Reflection," at the space Layer 7 of Plusjun in Yongsan, Seoul, and the five pieces came out on June 11, 2024 as Reflection (Original Soundtrack). The Budapest Music Center describes him as an artist working across contemporary and multidisciplinary art as well as the Korean club scene.

He has also made records with singers and songwriters. With the singer-songwriter Isaac Hong (홍이삭), who won the third season of the television contest Sing Again, he released "(n)everland" on April 6, 2023 and the six-track EP everland on April 26, 2023, with the songs written in English. A vinyl edition on Archive Achim, credited with his piano, keyboards, synthesizer, composing and arranging, is dated April 26, 2024 on Discogs. With the singer-songwriter Kim Il-du he co-composed and co-arranged, with Kim Chang-hee, the three-track Again i love you (February 26, 2024). On March 20, 2025 he released the two-track single Doublethink for piano and organ, whose second piece, "Undercast," features the vocalist Alía Mayoral with words by Cyruson Cho, and on August 29, 2025 a one-track single credited to Taehun (이태훈) and himself appeared, "Things That Never Became Words."

In 2024 the Korean Cultural Center in Hungary named him its third resident artist, after the cellist Chung Hosung (2020 to 2021) and the pianist Han Ji-ho (2022 to 2023), for a two-year term from 2024 to 2025. Hungary Today reported that he received the official commission on November 11, 2024. On November 18, 2024 he played "Jazz, Frequency and Resonance" in the Concert Hall of the Budapest Music Center with the pianist Gábor Cseke, the saxophonist János Ávéd, the bassist József Barcza-Horváth and the drummer László Csízi, members of the Modern Arts Orchestra. On September 22, 2025 he returned to the same hall for "Variations of Light," which paired his jazz pieces with a poetic drama written for the 80th anniversary of Korea's liberation, with a text by Lee Yeon-kyung, the vocalist Rozu, the geomungo player Buen Hyun Jei, the dancer Lim Semi and the reciter Lizett Alíz Kondorosi. His most recent release is Dreamers (August 20, 2026), an eight-track album with the trumpeter Brian Shin that Melon files under electronica, with four tracks written by the two together.

A 2013 prize is part of his public biography, and the sources do not agree on its name. The 2015 label text for The Fables says he won an ASCAP award, Melon's artist biography names it the Louis Armstrong Award, Design magazine repeats the ASCAP wording in 2020, and Hungary Today calls it the 2013 Louis Armstrong Scholarship of ASCAP. The Korean-language Mediapen and the Budapest Music Center write instead that it came from the Queens College School of Music, and a second Budapest page attributes the award to Jazz at Lincoln Center. No winners list naming him was found.

His work moves between several settings. At its quietest it is solo piano played muted, sometimes with an organ added. In the big band of The Fables it is programmatic writing for a full orchestra, and in Teho and in Kim Oki's groups it is improvisation with little prepared material, where, as Kim Seong-wan puts it in the notes to Teho1, the players are at ease with incompleteness.

The exhibition scores show a taste for working from images. The Saul Leiter pieces are titled after photographs and a quotation of the photographer, and the Son Jungkee pieces take their names from the paintings. The everland EP and the Kim Il-du record sit closer to songwriter pop and folk, and the Hungarian programme notes put his recent work in art-museum jazz, contemporary art and multidisciplinary performance. Jazz is the thread through all of it: his training at The New School, the New York big band, the Seoul jazz clubs, the sideman work with Kim Oki and the Budapest jazz concerts.