Kyung Eun Lim (임경은) is a South Korean jazz vocalist who has sung in Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi and Incheon area since about 1999 and has released two albums under her own name: the standards record My Favorite Standards (2009) and the vocal and piano duo album My Melody (2014), made with the pianist Yoon Seung Cho (조윤성). The cover of My Melody prints her name as Kyung Eun Lim, and her own concert videos credit her the same way. Streaming services and Korean listings file her as Lim Kyung Eun, Lim Kyung-eun or 임경은, and Discogs lists the artist under the Hangul alone. No source gives her birth date or birthplace.

A faculty profile on a Korean university site (bu.ac.kr) and Korean newspaper features from 2015 and 2016 say she studied at the Royal Conservatory in the Netherlands and in the graduate school of Queens College, City University of New York, and that she returned to Korea in 2009. None of them gives years of study or names a teacher. The faculty profile files her under practical music with jazz vocal as her field and lists her as the chief executive of VNB Music, the company whose YouTube channel carries her concert videos. An entry on My Melody in Naver's Knowledge Encyclopedia adds a first chapter: it says she graduated in history from Sangmyung Women's University in 1996 and was then a devoted listener rather than a performer, that she went to see the veteran player 최세진, who guided her toward jazz singing, and that his help got her singing in Korean jazz clubs. The Seoul Economic Daily counted her seventeenth year in jazz in December 2016, and the Jeju news site Jejusori called 2018 her nineteenth.

My Favorite Standards came out on November 20, 2009, on Pony Canyon Korea (catalog number PCSD00524 on the Aladin listing). It has ten standards, among them "I'll Remember April," "Blue Skies," "Pannonica," "All of You," "East of the Sun" and "On Green Dolphin Street," and runs 51 minutes 55 seconds, with "I'm All Smiles" as the title track. The release notes say she was not a singer who appeared suddenly after studying abroad: she had already earned respect from many jazz musicians before she left, and the years in the Netherlands and New York were a time of growth in the mainstream jazz she most wanted to learn. The pianist is Xavier Davis, whom the notes identify as a New York player and as the pianist of Betty Carter, one of the singers she admires most; the drummer is Quincy Davis; and the bassist is Hocheol Kim, a bandmate since before she went abroad who had recently come home from New York. The notes add that the pianist Fred Hersch and her own teacher, the vocalist JD Walter, praised the record. In 2011 "I'm All Smiles" was included on Rainbow 2010 Korean Jazz Best 27, a two-disc sampler that came with the June issue of the magazine Jazz People. She also sang as a guest on Souplus 2nd (PAG Jazz, March 7, 2012), the second album of the Latin jazz band in which Kim plays bass, and the last track, "Dear Jobim," is her piece.

My Melody followed on April 28, 2014 on streaming services and as a CD in May on Stone Music Entertainment (CMDC10294). Its cover reads "Kyung Eun Lim with Yoon Seung Cho," and Korean press calls it a vocal and piano duo album. It has eleven tracks and runs 47 minutes 49 seconds, with "Emptiness" as the title track, and the other titles are "Another Time," "Blues for Myself," "My Melody," "Jan Do Janeido," "In the Moment," "No More," "Like a River," "Lament," "La Princesa de Vario Norte" and "The Moon and the Ocean." Press notices for her concerts name eight of them as her own compositions: "Another Time," "Blues for Myself," "Emptiness," "My Melody," "No More," "Like a River," "Lament" and "La Princesa de Vario Norte." The liner essay is by the critic Kim Hyun-joon (김현준), who divides jazz singers into those who serve the song and those who treat the voice as an instrument, and writes that she has held to the second approach since her debut and with this album became a finished vocalist.

The duo format then carried her concert work for several years. She and Cho played a Duo Project at LIG Art Hall in Busan on March 14, 2014 and a concert in the Jazz Works series at the Formtec Works Hall in Mapo, Seoul, called "The Songs of Bill Evans." When Newstomato reported on the series in August 2022, it listed "Lim Kyung-eun and Cho Yoon-seung" among the acts that had played it. On November 1, 2015 she gave "Just Duo" at the small theater of the Suwon SK Artrium, a showcase backed by the Suwon Cultural Foundation's emerging-artist program: Cho, the guitarist Park Yun-woo (박윤우) and Kim each played a duo set with her, and the finale had all of them play three originals from My Melody. On December 13, 2015 she gave a "Four Seasons" concert in Incheon, supported by the Incheon Foundation for Arts and Culture and the Arts Council Korea, with sets arranged for duo, trio, quartet and quintet. In 2016 she played a UNESCO Jazz Day concert at the Bupyeong Art Center in Incheon on April 16 with the pianist Youngjoo Song, "The Art of Duo" at the Daejeon Artists' House on June 11 with Song, the guitarist Kim Jin-su (김진수), Kim and the drummer Song Jun-yeong (송준영), and a free duo concert with Song that Time Out Seoul listed for August 22. On December 16, 2016 she took the songs of My Melody to the Suwon SK Artrium again in an octet with Song, Kim Jin-su, Kim, the drummer Lim Ju-chan (임주찬), the saxophonist Lee Yong-seok (이용석) and trombone and trumpet guests, and she announced a Beatles program for February 10, 2017 at Maria Callas Hall in Seoul. The third duo concert, "All About Duo," took place on September 16, 2017 at the Bupyeong Art Center with support from the Incheon Foundation; a video of her and Song playing "Alone Together" from it is on the VNB Music channel.

She married Hocheol Kim in 2007, according to the Hankyoreh, and the Seoul Economic Daily says they met at a jazz cafe; the two work together often. In 2018 she won support from the Jeju Foundation for Arts and Culture for a project on the culture of Jeju's women divers, the haenyeo. She prepared by watching the documentary 물숨 and other films and books, and she wrote seven new songs with Kim, who was also the music director, among them "숨비소리" (Sumbi Sori, the name for the whistling breath a diver lets out on surfacing), a blues for the divers and "바다꽃" (Badakkot), which she based on a picture book by the same documentary's director, Go Hee-young. She also arranged the Jeju folk song "Ieodo Sana." The Hankyoreh described the resulting concert, "Singing Sumbi Sori" (숨비소리를 노래하다), as the first to render haenyeo culture in jazz. It took place on September 16, 2018 at the Seolmundae Women's Culture Center in Jeju, with Kim Jin-su on guitar, Shim Gyu-min on piano and Shin Dong-jin on drums.

Her later dated appearances are with Kim's circle of players. On April 5, 2019 her band, with Shim Gyu-min, Kim and Shin Dong-jin, played The Nora in Seoul, and on August 3, 2019 she played the Hangang Jazz Festa on the floating Sebitseom's Yebit stage. On November 2, 2019 the same quartet played the "Three Colors Jazz Vocal" evening of the Colorful Jazz series at the Bupyeong Art Center. On October 27, 2020 she sang with the vocalists Choi Yong-min and Nam Ye-ji and the Organic Band in a concert for the Incheon lifelong learning center that was also streamed online. On July 14, 2022 she was the guest vocalist at "Cinema in Jazz," a concert of film themes by the trio Gentle Rain, led by the drummer Seo Duk Won, at the Michuhol lifelong learning center in Incheon, and on September 16, 2023 her band, with the pianist Lee Ji-young (이지영), Kim and the drummer Song Ha-yeon (송하연), played the Mullae Jazz IN club in Seoul. A 2025 instructor guide of the practical music department at Sungshin Women's University still lists her among its vocal teachers, with her two albums as her recording credits.

Not documented: a third album, a birth date or birthplace, the years she studied in the Netherlands and New York, or the name of the Dutch conservatory's city.

Press releases for her concerts describe her as a vocalist with an intelligent, warm sensibility and a "complete" voice, and say she handles melody with polish and improvises well. In a Seoul Economic Daily interview in December 2016 she said listeners often tell her she does not sound like a typical jazz singer, and that what matters to her is not tone or phrasing but whether a singer can swing freely inside her own music; her first rule, she said, is to sing as if telling a story. She added that she had once only imitated jazz and had come to feel free in it only recently, and that she did not yet feel ready to blend with other kinds of music. Time Out Seoul pointed to her scat singing, and the Hankyoreh quoted her comparing the divers' whistling breath to the way scat releases what a singer wants to say.

Her repertoire sits in the mainstream. My Favorite Standards is ten standards arranged for a New York rhythm section, her concert programs have included Brazilian standards and "Fascinating Rhythm," and she built a duo project around the songs of Bill Evans. Her own songs on My Melody and in the Jeju project show a singer-composer working in the same language. The only influence named in what has been published is Betty Carter, whom the first album's notes list among the vocalists she admires most; no other influences are listed here.