Suyu Kim (김수유; printed Kim Suyu in festival listings) is a South Korean guitarist and songwriter who works on the edge of the Seoul jazz scene and the indie rock and folk world. His jazz side is real but small: a debut single in 2014, an album of original jazz-rock instrumentals in 2019, a guitar and harmonica EP in 2022, a place in the Jarasum Jazz Festival's 2020 guitar programme The Guitarist, a spot in the 2024 Jinju Jazz Concert, and the 2026 quintet Picnic on Busy Day. Most of his recordings are something else. Of his seven releases under his own name (one of them a duo), Bugs files three under jazz and four under folk, indie and rock, and the bands he plays in (Stereo Bubble, Number One Korean, Frogrio) are indie rock groups, while Nalda mixes pansori with rock, funk and jazz. This profile covers the verifiable material only, and it is thin: no interview, no biography and no entry in Discogs, MusicBrainz or Wikipedia was found.

His releases and channels bill him as 김수유 (Suyu Kim); the cover of his 2014 single prints 김수유 [su:yu], the credits of Picnic on Busy Day print KIM Suyu, and the Jarasum pages print the Hangul only. This profile uses Suyu Kim, the form on his streaming releases, and keeps the festival's spelling where it quotes the festival.

The earliest facts come from a Naver profile reposted on the blog of a Seoul practical-music school, which lists a grand prize at the 2011 Kyunghyang practical music contest and admission to both the Seoul Institute of the Arts and the Dong-ah Institute of Media and Arts in 2012. The same post says he released a first album in his first university year and formed the vocal band Stereo Bubble in 2013; no 2012 release was found, and the release notes of his April 2014 single call that single his first single album. Those notes describe him as a 22-year-old jazz guitarist studying at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and as a young player whom the working jazz musicians of the day were counting on. In June 2024 the Kyeongnam Domin Ilbo wrote that he had been called a prodigy since high school and had already shared stages with established musicians while still a student.

Have You Ever Seen A Rainbow? (April 9, 2014, distributed by Genie Music) holds three originals: the title piece, "Crying Potato" (the title track, built on a riff that came up during playing and, the notes say, the piece that drew the most excitement in his live sets) and "Waiting for Curry". The notes say the last was inspired by a year of Wednesday-night gigs at a club in Sinsa-dong, Seoul, with a curry meal before each set, and that it is an homage to John Scofield, a guitarist he respects; they call it the closest of the three to standard jazz, with the electric guitar and a saxophone trading melodies. Bugs and Melon both file the single, and Melon's ticket page lists him as a jazz guitarist with the debut date April 9, 2014 and the debut song "Crying Potato".

His first full-length album, What a Little Dragon!, followed on June 27, 2019, five years after the single. It has ten tracks and 48 minutes of original music, all composed by him and produced by him with the bassist Wonseok Oh (오원석) as associate producer. The release note describes jazz phrasing with folk feeling, country-style melody lines and rock energy, mostly in guitar-trio sound, with a harmonica quartet, solo guitar, a duo and a piano, guitar and harmonica trio; the title piece is a tribute to a pet iguana of his childhood. The credits list him on electric and acoustic guitars, guitar synth and sitar guitar, Wonseok Oh on bass on five tracks, Jaekon Jeon (전제곤) on double bass on three, Sungha Kim (김성하) and Junyoung Song (송준영) on drums, Hangyeol Lee (이한결) on harmonica on three tracks and Lucia Choi (최루시아) on piano on one; Hyomin Kang engineered it at Brickwall Sound. Bugs files it under jazz, in the style jazz rock, and Apple Music lists it as jazz.

In 2020 he was one of the three guitarists of the Jarasum festival's Beyond programme The Guitarist, with Charlie Jung and Jo Young-deok; the festival describes them as three guitarists, each with a firmly established style. The edition was the festival's 17th, held October 9 to 25, 2020. The same year the CJ Culture Foundation's TUNE UP programme listed the quartet Gyeonggi Nambu Jazz (경기남부재즈, "Southern Gyeonggi Jazz"), a group that presents itself under a fictional pen name as a creative collective concerned with spreading Korean jazz and making it popular. The four members are 임태웅 on sori (traditional vocals), 김경민 on drums, Kim Suyu on guitar and Wonseok Oh on bass; the page is dated April 1, 2020, belongs to the 21st TUNE UP group and presents the group's first album, 주의무게. A school blog calls the group a gugak fusion band.

Between the jazz dates came a long list of other work. Bugs lists Stereo Bubble as a trio of Kim (guitar and vocals), Wonseok Oh and Sungha Kim, with a 2018 debut: the EP 방울의 힘 (November 14, 2018), several 2019 singles and the album 신나는 음악세상 (November 14, 2020). Its biography says his music began from the childhood influence of the bands Crying Nut and Sanulrim. The Korean Wikipedia page of the horn-section rock band Number One Korean lists him as its guitarist (the school blog calls the band punk rock), and of the trio Frogrio (the album Frogrio 1st, May 23, 2022). In May 2022 he and the harmonica player Hangyeol Lee released Reminiscence, a five-track EP for guitar and harmonica only, recorded in single takes without other rhythm instruments, which Bugs files under jazz; one piece, "Mother and Son", was written by the two of them together.

His own songs began in September 2022 with "순이 우주로", a guitar-and-voice cover of a Crying Nut song, and continued in April 2025 with "아버지가 쓰시던 기타" (the old guitar of his father, which he says he first took out of a storeroom in the summer of his last year of primary school, according to his own note), the EP 통기타 꼬질이의 싸구려 골방 (May 27, 2025) and the single "너의 아침 식사" (April 23, 2026). Bugs files these under folk, indie and rock. The note for the 2022 single says he had worked as a sideman for the singer Choi Baek-ho, the singer Suran and the harmonica player Jeon Jeduk as well as in Stereo Bubble, Gyeonggi Nambu Jazz and Number One Korean, and the school blog adds a national tour and a Sejong Center concert with Choi's band and appearances on the TV programmes Open Concert and EBS Space Gonggam; no release credit or dated notice for those engagements was found. The school blog also says that in 2021 Jazz People magazine named him its Rising Star of the Year. That is a single secondhand report and no magazine page was found.

He appears as a guitarist on other artists' singles as well: the 2017 single "Midsummer's Night" by Dynamite and Mellow (credited guitar), the 2026 single "소용돌이" by Ahn Hee-su (arrangement, electric guitar and bass) and the 2026 single "그냥 두고 가셔요" by Yang Eum-pyo (arrangement and guitar). Guitar festivals have also booked him: on October 12, 2023 he took part in the first night of a four-day jazz guitar festival there, a night of blues and acoustic music with Charlie Jung, Jo Young-deok, Park Yoon-woo and Jo Shin-il, in a festival of 20 guitarists, as the Kihoilbo reported.

On June 26, 2024 he was one of the guitarists of the 10th Jinju Jazz Concert at the Gyeongnam Culture and Arts Center, a free concert organised by the Kyeongnam Domin Ilbo around "beautiful songs we had forgotten", Korean love songs of the 1950s to 1990s played in new jazz arrangements. He and the guitarist Lee Ji-ho (이지호) arranged Nami's 1989 hit "인디안 인형처럼" for it. The rest of the band was the saxophonists Yoosun Nam and Kim Gi-beom (김기범), the pianist Shin A-ram (신아람), the bassist Ryu Hyeong-gon (류형곤) and the drummer Gideok Moon, with the singers Lee Ji-min, RUST Choi Hong-seo and Lee Young-ju.

His most recent band is Picnic on Busy Day, a jazz-based quintet that Bugs lists with a 2026 debut. Its members are Kim (guitar), Hangyeol Lee (EWI and harmonica), Zia Yoon (윤지아, keyboards), Minseok Jee (지민석, bass) and Sungha Kim (drums). It released the singles "Picnic on Busy Day" (August 3, 2026) and "Be the Champ!" (August 25, 2026) and the EP A Little Picnic (September 14, 2026, five tracks, 23 minutes), all composed by Kim and arranged by the band. He is also the guitarist of Nalda (날다), a six-piece band of two pansori singers, Oh Dan-hae and Seo Jin-sil, with Kim on guitar, Lee Jun on bass, Kim Su-jun on drums and Lee Hyo-ju on keyboards, whose EP Ronalda (July 19, 2026) sets passages of the pansori Chunhyangga and the folk songs "Arirang" and "Neoyeongnayeong" to jazz, funk and metal; Kim co-composed four of the eight pieces and is credited as the music producer.

What is not known is most of the rest: his birth date and place, his teachers, whether he finished his degree, any interviews, and the details of his sideman work. No Wikipedia, Wikidata, MusicBrainz or Discogs entry for him was found.

His own words are few. The notes for his 2014 single name John Scofield as a guitarist he respects, say the record favors balance among the instruments over technical display, and explain that the traffic light on its cover stands for his wish to break preconceptions. The 2019 album's note describes a jazz vocabulary with folk feeling, country-style melodies and rock energy; the Stereo Bubble biography says he started in music from the bands Crying Nut and Sanulrim; and the notes for Picnic on Busy Day's "Be the Champ!" cite the guitar riffs of 1960s West Coast surf rock, blues and punk-rock energy, an EWI melody recalling 1980s Japanese fusion jazz, psychedelic rock and a retro organ sound. The 2025 EP is acoustic country-folk and indie pop, not jazz.

No source describes his tone or technique in detail, so nothing is said about it here.