Hoo Kim (김영후) is a South Korean double bassist, composer and arranger. He has led two small-group albums, Dancing on the Floor (2014) and You Will Be Free If You Truly Wish to Be (2016), and in 2022 released Common Heritage of Humankind, a big-band suite for an eleven-piece line-up under the name Hoo Kim Big Band. Since 2018 he has also been the bassist of the drummer Soojin Suh's Chordless Quartet and Coloris Trio. His own sleeves, Discogs and the streaming services bill him as Hoo Kim, and the cover of each of his albums prints 김영후 beneath the name. Other listings spell it Younghoo Kim, Young Hoo Kim or Kim Young-hoo.

Little has been published about his early life: no source found gives his birth date or birthplace. Orford Music's biography says he entered Chung-Ang University in Seoul in 2002, majoring in philosophy and orchestral music, and took jazz training at the Seoul Jazz Academy in 2004. The biography on his Genie album page says he began working as a professional in 2007, with credits that include the EBS programme Space Gonggam, and played with first-generation Korean jazz bands and with musicians of every generation. It adds that the magazine Jazz People named him a rising star in 2008 and that in the same year he began a second course of study in orchestral music at Chung-Ang. A 2017 review on Naver's music pages says that before going abroad he was the bassist in the trios of Jeon Young-se (전영세) and Lee Young-kyung (이영경).

At the end of 2009 he left for the United States. He took his bachelor's degree at Berklee College of Music in 2013 and a master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music in New York in 2016. According to the Genie biography he was chosen for the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, where he studied and performed with teachers including Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Joe Lovano, and was invited to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival and at the Paris Conservatoire. In New York the same biography places him on the stages of the Jazz Standard and Smalls with Donny McCaslin and Peter Retzlaff, and says he studied twelve-tone improvisation with Dave Liebman and big-band and jazz-philharmonic arranging with Jim McNeely.

Reviewers of his leader work describe progressive harmony and rhythm used to carry melody: Genie's text for the first album speaks of modern harmonic language from contemporary jazz to free jazz, and for the second says he kept to feeling so that the advanced vocabulary does not turn cold. The Naver reviewer hears memorable tunes, a clean and intelligent sound and loose rhythmic interplay, with the bass supplying the rhythmic freedom. Jay Anderson's note picks out an unusual sound and approach and a technique that carries easily around the instrument, and in the Soojin Suh trio reviewers single out his arco playing and his bass solos.

His biography ties his large-ensemble writing to his master's studies with Jim McNeely and Dave Liebman at the Manhattan School of Music and to the orchestral training he took in Seoul. Common Heritage of Humankind gives each movement a theme drawn from the history of human cooperation, and for "Cognitive Revolution" his note describes melodic lines that are handed among many instruments and crossed, so that independent lines sound as one piece.