Jeong Lim Yang (양정림) is a double bassist and composer who was born in Seoul, South Korea, and has worked in New York since 2011. She has led four albums: Déjà Vu (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2017), Requiem Suite Bass Duets (a download release with Trevor Dunn, 2021), Zodiac Suite: Reassured (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2022), a trio reworking of Mary Lou Williams's 1945 suite, and Synchronicity (Sunnyside, 2025), a quartet with the violist Mat Maneri, the pianist Jacob Sacks and the drummer Randy Peterson. She also plays in the quartet Mute, and the New York City Jazz Record has described her as a key figure of the city's avant-garde for more than a decade, as leader, collaborator and sideman. Her date of birth is not published. She goes by Lim Yang on her Bandcamp page and was billed as the Lim Yang Quintet at The Jazz Gallery in 2018; Jeong Lim Yang is the name on her albums.

She grew up in South Korea in a family without much money, which left little room for extra music lessons. In an interview she says music reached her through television and school classes, that she asked her mother for pansori or violin lessons and could not have them, and that she began bass and jazz lessons in high school after a friend told her bass was easier than guitar and would get her into a band. After high school she enrolled at a Korean music institution, did not stay, and began playing gigs in Seoul at about 18 or 19. Korean Wikipedia, the only source found for this detail, says she played in the Yoo Seung-ho Trio and appeared with it in the EBS Space Gonggam special "2007, 그들을 주목한다."

In 2007, according to Korean Wikipedia, she moved to the United States East Coast and enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston. A Berklee program for a concert at the Lawrence and Alma Berk Recital Hall on June 15, 2009 lists her on bass, from Seoul, with her own piece "Middle West Happy" alongside tunes by Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver; the guitarist on that bill, Greg Duncan, plays on her earliest Discogs credit. She studied there with the saxophonist Joe Lovano, according to an interview. Her biographies place her in New York from 2011 (Korean Wikipedia says 2012), and she now lives in Brooklyn and teaches bass and piano at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.

Her first recording credits come from the trumpeter Jason Palmer's hard bop session Nothing To Hide (SteepleChase, 2010) and the vibraphonist Yuhan Su's Flying Alone (2012), made with Su, a Taiwanese vibraphonist, according to Korean Wikipedia. Over the following years she worked with Tim Berne, Russ Lossing, Jacob Sacks, Oscar Noriega, Mary Halvorson and Billy Mintz, according to Korean and German Wikipedia. With Noriega and the pianist Marta Sánchez she recorded Deluxe as The Crooked Trio (Barbès Records, 2018), and in 2020 she put out a run of Bandcamp releases in the trio Vibratitos with the vibraphonist Kenny Wollesen and Noriega on drums. In 2024 she played bass on the pianist John Chin's Journey Of Han and wrote one of its pieces, "Promising World."

Déjà Vu was recorded on September 20, 2015 at Tedesco Studio in New Jersey and came out in 2017. Her quintet was the saxophonists Adam Kolker (tenor) and Michaël Attias (alto), the pianist Nick Sanders and the drummer Jesse Simpson, playing eight originals that she also produced; Eivind Opsvik mixed it. All About Jazz's Troy Dostert called it an excellent debut that favors open space over up-tempo workouts or complicated writing, and she took the material to The Jazz Gallery on November 1, 2018 with the same players.

She co-leads Mute with the saxophonist and clarinetist Kevin Sun, the pianist Christian Li and the drummer Dayeon Seok. The quartet's first album, Mute (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2019), has nine tracks written by the four members, two of them by Yang ("Are You Happy Now?", which she also recorded on Déjà Vu, and "Palindromania's Dream"). Its second, After You've Gone (self-released, May 10, 2024), includes "Not My Blues," a title that also appears on The Crooked Trio's Deluxe, and "Taepyeongso Blues," and its title piece is on Jazziz magazine's Fall 2024 "Quartets" sampler CD.

On April 2, 2021 she released Requiem Suite Bass Duets with Trevor Dunn: two duets for two double basses, the first pieces of a book of bass duets that she planned to extend by one track a month, dedicated to deceased friends and to people who suffer from their loss. Zodiac Suite: Reassured was recorded on May 16, 2021 at Douglass Recording Studio in Brooklyn with the pianist Santiago Leibson and the drummer Gerald Cleaver and released in October 2022. It keeps Williams's twelve zodiac pieces, opens with "Pisces" rather than "Aries," and adds a thirteenth, her own "Madam, Thank You, Madam." Textura heard a balanced trio where Williams's recording centers on the piano, and Jazz Weekly's George W. Harris called it a set of personal horoscopes. Her biographies say the Zodiac Suite project has been played at venues including Lincoln Center and SFJAZZ.

Synchronicity followed on Sunnyside Communications (SSC 1743) on January 31, 2025. She says it grew out of a gig at Barbès, where she wanted to play with Sacks, invited Maneri, and Maneri brought in Peterson, and that her reading of C. G. Jung and the vivid dreams of her childhood shaped it. Reviewers found a modern Modern Jazz Quartet in it (Abe Goldstien, Papatamus Redux) and a shadowy sound in the ECM mold (Brad Cohan, New York City Jazz Record, May 2025). Listings show the quartet booked at KM28 in Berlin on May 8, 2026 and at Splendor in Amsterdam on May 11, 2026, and a remix of "Ordinary Waltz" appeared on The Wire's subscriber download Below The Radar 49 in December 2025. Alongside the jazz work she records singer-songwriter music as Miss Ambivalent, with two Bandcamp releases (2023 and 2024).

Her Korean connection is real but early. She was born in Seoul, learned the bass and began gigging there, and by Korean Wikipedia's account was in a Seoul trio before leaving in 2007; her training after that and her recording career are American. Her citizenship is not stated in any source found.

She plays the double bass as a melodic voice as well as a rhythmic floor, and the writing around her tends to leave space. Dostert wrote that Déjà Vu carves out room for its melodies to breathe; Cohan hears understated command, a chilled-out rhythmic flow and feverish tension, and a leader who gives her bandmates space while laying a turbulent foundation of her own. The All About Jazz review places her originals in the line of Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, courting abstraction and lyricism in equal measure. Déjà Vu's "Moon Tethered" is, according to The Jazz Gallery's program note, a tribute to the Masabumi Kikuchi, Gary Peacock and Motian trio, and Yang names Masabumi Kikuchi among her influences.

In the interview she lists the Bill Evans trio as her first major jazz influence, along with Motian's modern records (which her teacher Joe Lovano pointed her to), Bill Frisell, Kikuchi and Ornette Coleman, whose playing she says feels genuine to her. She writes in a range from the tuneful (Déjà Vu) to the freely improvised (Synchronicity, which Jazz Trail describes as mixing composition and improvisation, with a contrafact of "Body and Soul" titled "Body Nor Soul"), and she sees little difference between her songwriting as Miss Ambivalent and her instrumental writing.