Hyelim Kim (김혜림) is a daegeum player, composer and ethnomusicologist who trained in Korea and has been based in London since at least 2013. The daegeum is the large Korean transverse bamboo flute, and she is a soloist in the traditional repertoire as well as a regular guest on free-improvisation and jazz-scene stages. Her own identity is more gugak, the Korean traditional music she was schooled in, and free improvisation than jazz in the narrow sense, and this page says so plainly. What ties her to the jazz world is where she plays and who she plays with: the London Jazz Festival, the Vortex, Café OTO, the Mopomoso series, drummers such as Simon Barker and Mark Sanders, and the Sori Quartet, which sets Korean traditional music beside jazz. Her birth date and birthplace are not published. She releases and performs as Hyelim Kim, and her older publicity also spells the instrument taegŭm or taegum.

Her training was in Korea. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation says she studied at the National Gugak High School and then at Seoul National University, concentrating on the basics of the daegeum, and the Korean Cultural Center New York lists bachelor's and master's degrees in Korean music from Seoul National University. A SOAS biography says she has worked as a professional composer and taegum soloist since 2000 and has taught at SOAS, Hanyang University and Kyungbuk National University. Her Korean honours include the Kumho Young Artist title (2006, according to a 2017 London Korean Links preview), a Gold Medal at the Korean National Daegeum Competition and first prize at the Korean National Chongro Music Competition. The same preview says the Korea Arts Council named her a pioneering artist for 2009 to 2010 and that she performed at the Omi residency in New York in 2009. Wanting to see how the tradition would work in a different setting, she went abroad, first to Australia and then to Britain. By 2013 she was a PhD student in ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, researching how Korean music has globalised, and a SOAS seminar notice of February 2015 gives her PhD as awarded in 2014. She later became a visiting research fellow at Bath Spa University, and Routledge published her monograph on taegum performance, Tradition and Creativity in Korean Taegum Flute Performance, in 2022.

Her debut album, Nim (Universal, 2013), was reviewed in Songlines in the January and February 2014 issue, where Charlie Cawood gave it four stars. It holds seven pieces covering traditional taegum sanjo with changgo hourglass drum, two contemporary compositions by Taesong Kim, two improvised duets, one with the Australian drummer Simon Barker and one with the shakuhachi player Kiku Day, and her own "Pojagi", which uses electronically manipulated sound. The duets with Barker started a collaboration that has run for more than a decade. In November 2013 she was a guest of the trumpeter Byron Wallen and Peter Wiegold's house band notes inégales at Club Inégales during that year's EFG London Jazz Festival, on November 21. A live double-bill recording from the 2017 festival, Expect the Unexpected (Club Inégales, 2021), credits her on Korean flute. Discogs also lists her on the pianist Lubomyr Melnyk's Rivers and Streams (Erased Tapes, 2015), on the two "Amazon" pieces that close the album, which were recorded at Elderfield Studio in London in June 2015.

The London improvised-music scene took her in during the middle of the decade. Eclectic (Liz Music, 2016), billed to the Hyelim Kim Music Project 2016, is a fully improvised concert with the pianist Steve Beresford and the German cellist Ute Kanngiesser, recorded at i'Klectik Art Lab on November 3, 2016. Beresford also plays in the London Improvisers Orchestra, the large improvising ensemble she joined. She plays daegeum on two pieces on the orchestra's double CD Twenty Years On (2018), drawn from its monthly residency at Iklectik, and she is credited on its 2020 lockdown recording Together Alone. In 2018 she recorded a duet, "Forest", for Blanca Regina's Spontaneous Music, a set of duets made at Wilton Way Studios in London in August 2018, and she is credited on taegum on the percussionist Michel Lambert's Ars Transmutatoria Bleu (2020), recorded at the Old Church in Stoke Newington on December 12, 2019.

On October 2, 2017 she shared the bill at the Vortex Jazz Club with the singer and violinist Alice Zawadzki, in a K-music festival band with the guitarist Rob Luft and the bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado. She is the daegeum player on Zawadzki's Within You Is a World of Spring (Whirlwind, 2019), and she is a co-writer with Zawadzki and Luft of the track "The Woods". With Barker she made Out of Time, recorded in Sydney on December 3, 2017; its eleven pieces include several titled for materials, among them bamboo, metal, wood, gourd, clay, silk, stone and hide, and Barker's liner note says the project grew out of the interest jazz musicians have shown in Korean rhythms. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation says LIZ Music released it in September 2019 with support from Arts Council Korea, while the Bandcamp page carries a date of June 15, 2023. In September 2019 the Australian Art Orchestra's Meeting Points series presented Leaf and Shadow, with her and Barker among the players, at the Pavilion in Melbourne on September 22. On November 2 she, Barker and the trumpeter Peter Knight played a Meeting Points concert at the Vortex that the listing describes as coming straight from JazzFest Berlin.

She worked in other forms during the same years. Daegeum in Motion (2019), made with the guitarist Joel Bell and filmed by Suki Mok, was inspired by Rudolf Laban's five dynamics and performed at Siobhan Davies Studios. Dansang: The City (2020), a short film she directed, composed and performed, was funded by the PRS Foundation and won the Best Sound & Music award at the Los Angeles Experimental Film Festival in 2020. In February 2022 she gave a solo recital, "Tradition and Creation", at the National Gugak Center in Seoul, premiering her own Imyeon (이면) and Bruce Crossman's Border (경계); Imyeon was composed and performed with the janggu player Jihye Kim. Crossman's Heaven to Earth Border House (Navona, 2021) includes the same Border material on its sixth track, alongside the gayageum player Yi Ji-young. Her 2022 EP Pungryu and her 2024 album Songs of the Forest Calm, which features Kasper Staub and Torben Westergaard, are on Apple Music.

Sensitive to Light (Shrike Records, 2023), recorded at the Vortex on September 28, 2022 with the drummer Mark Sanders and the double bassist John Edwards, is her trio record in the free-improvisation tradition. It was released on a limited CDr run of 200 copies, with five pieces credited to all three players, and is dedicated to the bassist and composer Simon H Fell. In 2023 she received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for composers, and Café OTO's artist page also notes a session with Nils Frahm on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction and a concertino for daegeum premiered with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris.

Since 2023 she has been one of four Korean improvisers in the Sori Quartet, with the Stuttgart pianist Gee Hye Lee, the singer Song Yi Jeon and the Amsterdam drummer Sun-Mi Hong. The group, whose members live in four European cities, played the K-music festival at Milton Court in London on November 1, 2023, a concert listed under Hong's name, and the 34th Akbank Jazz Festival in Istanbul on October 9, 2024; the festival describes it as an ensemble of four adventurous Korean improvisers who blend jazz, traditional Korean music and free improvisation. She appeared in the Mopomoso series on September 21, 2025 and with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra at the Glad Cafe on October 11, 2025. She is the daegeum guest on four tracks of The Endless Dance, Hannah Peel and Beibei Wang's album for Real World Records, released on May 22, 2026.

Her playing starts from sanjo and the court and folk repertoire of Korean traditional music, and her research is about exactly that tradition: how it is performed, modernised and exported. Most of her own composing and improvising is an extension of it. Her stated aim is new possibilities for Korean music and exchange with a wide range of musical cultures, and her collaborators include the gayageum player Yi Ji-young, the shakuhachi player Kiku Day, the composer Bruce Crossman, the guitarist Joel Bell and the free-improvisation rhythm players Mark Sanders and John Edwards.

The jazz connection is real but partial. Barker's liner notes for Out of Time describe shared tonal qualities that he relates to blues and Korean folk music, and the project tests Korean rhythmic structures through improvisation with Korean and Western percussion. Sensitive to Light and Eclectic are filed under free improvisation by Discogs. Alice Zawadzki's record sits in contemporary jazz and the Sori Quartet in a Korean-traditional-meets-jazz frame. The Ethno Jazz and European Free Jazz tags above reflect that scene context, not a claim that she is a straight-ahead jazz musician.