Woong San (웅산) is a South Korean jazz singer and songwriter, born Kim Eun-young (김은영) on April 18, 1973, in Mungyeong, North Gyeongsang Province. Her releases and Discogs bill her as Woong San; Korean and English press also write WoongSan or Woongsan. The stage name, 雄山 in Chinese characters, is a Buddhist dharma name she received at the temple Guinsa when she was preparing to become a nun. She made her professional debut in 1996, has worked in Japan since 1998, and released her first full album, Love Letters, in December 2003. By her record company's count in October 2026 she had made 19 albums, among them 11 studio albums. She has led the Korea Jazz Association since January 2021. She is a different person from the pianist Eunyoung Kim, whose name is spelled the same as Woong San's birth name.

She grew up in a devout Buddhist family. In an interview published in July 2026 she said that in her second year of high school she decided on her own to leave home for monastic life and enjoyed the time in the temple, until one day while praying she felt strongly that she was meant to sing in the world rather than sit there. She studied Chinese at Sangji University (the entering class of 1993, according to Korean Wikipedia) and sang in a heavy-metal band at college. The Gyeongnam Ilbo reported in 2014 that she won the popularity and vocal prizes at the 1993 MBC College Music Festival. After she turned to jazz she earned a master's degree in postmodern music at Kyung Hee University, where she later taught as an adjunct professor, and a 2011 Newsis profile named the singers Ali, Hyewon of the band Winterplay and Beige among her students.

Her first album came out in two countries at once. Love Letters (EMI, EKJD-0061, December 12, 2003) was made in New York with the pianist Benny Green, the bassist Lonnie Plaxico, the drummer Rodney Green, and the trombonist Conrad Herwig, who also arranged; the saxophonist Hisatsugu Suzuki is credited and Keiichi Ishibashi produced. It was issued in Japan and sold in Korea as an import. A 2010 news report says she had begun her Japanese work with a release on an independent label in 2004. The Blues (EMI, November 2005) followed, a blues album that sets Korean-language songs beside standards such as "I'd Rather Go Blind" and "Fine and Mellow".

Yesterday (EMI, July 19, 2007) made her widely known in Korea. She wrote the title song, which was used in a Maxim Arabica coffee commercial, and she told the Herald in 2025 that her mother, who happened to overhear her writing it, said it seemed to have been given to her by the Buddha. Two of the guests on the record are profiled on JazzProfiles.com: the harmonica player Jeon Jeduk, who is credited on "아무말 말아요", and the trumpeter Juhan Lee, who is credited on "I Sing the Blues". On March 5, 2008, at the fifth Korean Music Awards at Sungkyunkwan University's Millennium Hall, Yesterday won Best Jazz and Crossover Album and the title song won Best Jazz and Crossover Song.

Japan took her seriously earlier than most of Korea did. In November 2008, after signing with Pony Canyon, she gave a showcase at the company's Tokyo headquarters, singing in fluent Japanese, and her Japanese major-label debut, Feel Like Making Love (Pony Canyon, December 17, 2008), had Hisatsugu Suzuki as producer and arranger. By then the Korean press counted more than 500 concerts in Japan since 1998. English Wikipedia and a 2026 concert announcement say she was the first Korean to perform at the Blue Note in New York, and the announcement adds Billboard Live Tokyo; a 2025 Herald profile makes the Blue Note claim, tied to a project with Japanese musicians, without naming a city. Her fifth album, Close Your Eyes, appeared in Japan in December 2009 and in Korea in March 2010; in January 2010 her management announced that Swing Journal, the Japanese jazz magazine, had given it a Gold Disc, the first time a Korean had received one. Its Japanese edition has the Japanese vocalist and trumpeter TOKU as a guest on "Walk On By". The special album Once I Loved (After Beat, October 2010) was recorded on July 13 to 15, 2010 with Japanese players, and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino guests on "As Time Goes By". In 2011 the Japanese magazine Jazz Hihyo gave her two prizes at its fifth Jazz Audio Disc Awards, an album prize and the gold prize in the vocal category, according to the Gyeongnam Ilbo.

Tomorrow (October 4, 2011), her sixth album, was a conscious step away from the strained intensity of her early records. She told Newsis that the earlier blues had been a scream and that this one should seep in without weighing on the listener, and she wrote the title song after the March 2011 earthquake in Japan. The pianist Cho Yoon-seung is credited as pianist and producer on the album's 2023 vinyl edition, with the guitarist Charlie Jung and the bandoneon player Ko Sang-ji, and the record includes her versions of Shin Jung-hyeon's "꽃잎" and Sanulrim's "찻잔". The press called her the original Korean-wave jazz singer, because she had been working in Japan well before K-pop groups arrived there.

I Love You (October 2013) has Spanish and Korean versions of "Asi Que" and "Mi Tango Triste", and The Best (November 2014) gathered her Korean hits. In December 2014 she gave a concert with the guitarist Lee Ritenour. In 2014 a vocal-cord polyp was found just before she began recording her next album; she told Money Today that it taught her to stop forcing her voice, and that she now thought of jazz as something you travel with rather than overcome. Temptation (August 12, 2015), begun in July 2014 and recorded live-style in a single pass according to that interview, is a funk and soul set, with Ritenour and the bassist Nathan East as guests, as well as Hino on trumpet, Hisatsugu Suzuki, the pianist John Beasley and Charlie Jung. A tour of small towns began in Geochang on September 9, 2015 and ended in Busan on December 30. In 2016 she marked 20 years as a professional with the mini-album Jazz Is My Life (November 1, 2016), and appeared in the MBC television singing contest King of Mask Singer.

I'm Alright (Universal Music Korea, September 5, 2018) was her ninth album, released in Korea and Japan together. The Grammy-nominated pianist John Beasley produced it and played on it, with the guitarist Paul Jackson Jr., the bassist Benjamin Shepherd, the drummer Terreon Gully, the trumpeter Damon Brown and Charlie Jung; Ten Asia described it as smooth jazz with funky and bluesy colour, with "I'm Alright" and "Love Is a Losing Game" as the title songs. In May 2020 she began a series of Korean popular songs rearranged as jazz, Love, Its Longing (사랑 그 그리움), which reached its third volume in January 2024 and its fourth on August 3, 2026, with the clarinetist Takanori Suzuki as guest. Her label describes the series as a project to bring jazz to a wider audience. The third volume reuses two songs from a tribute album to the first-generation singer Kim Jun, What a Wonderful World (June 2023), which she produced and on which she sings three tracks, including "사랑하니까".

In 2021 her work outside the studio widened. In January she became the third president of the Korea Jazz Association (founded in 2009), after the pianist Shin Kwan-woong and the saxophonist Lee Jeong-sik, and on April 29 she organised a concert for the eve of International Jazz Day with first-, second- and third-generation Korean players. At the 2021 Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards that October she received a Prime Minister's Commendation, and the organisers announced a jazz and trot crossover performance by her and Lee Jeong-sik for the online ceremony. A 2022 report on her appointment as Mungyeong's city ambassador lists, among her honours, the Jazz Grand Prize of the 25th Korea Culture and Entertainment Awards and a 2018 Asia Best Awards prize for contribution to the arts. In 2022 she was the general planner of the Seoul Jazz Festa, held on Nodeul Island from April 26 to May 1 and chosen as one of Seoul's seven flagship festivals that year; Newstomato reported that she had pitched the idea to city officials herself. A 2026 concert announcement describes her as the festival's founder and artistic director. Her tenth album, Who Stole the Skies (Universal Music, September 22, 2022), set Korean folk song and pansori vocal technique inside blues, funk and progressive jazz, with Lee Jeong-sik, the guitarists Charlie Jung and SAZA (Choi Woo-jun), the organist Seong Gi-mun and the producer Jamil Soul; its title song carries a message about environmental pollution. In September 2025 she was announced as the main act of the Wellness Seoul festival with a project called Nanjang, which mixes Korean traditional music, jazz and hip-hop, and in May 2026 she released two singles under the name Woong San & Nanjang Project.

Her 30th anniversary year has been busy. On July 7, 2026 she was general artistic director of a meditation concert at the Mapo Arts Center that combined jazz, gugak and traditional dance. In September two sold-out nights at La MaMa in New York's East Village honoured the video artist Nam June Paik, with video direction by Young Cheong, a professor at CUNY Brooklyn College, according to Sports Kyunghyang. Her 11th studio album, Here's to Life, appeared digitally on October 6, 2026 with ten songs, among them her own "The Blues of Reading Gaol", inspired by Oscar Wilde's imprisonment, and the standard that gives the album its title. Concerts in Osaka on October 13 and in Tokyo on October 15 were announced for the same tour, and a 30th anniversary concert at the Sejong Center Grand Theater on November 25, 2026 is still ahead.

She sings in a low, husky, soulful voice, and critics and her labels describe her as a singer who blends jazz with blues, funk and Latin rhythms, with a strong stage presence. Her records divide into three kinds. The early Korean albums mix standards with her own Korean-language songs, the Japanese-market albums are smoother and lean on standards, and since 2020 she has also made a series of Korean song rearrangements and an album that draws on folk song and pansori. She told Newstomato in 2022 that the Korean blues singer Han Young-ae, whom she calls a diva, did much to keep her own blues feeling alive. She has described jazz as the freest music, a form that should always stand on a border and meet other arts, and she has studied pansori and Korean traditional music for several years to put that idea into practice.

Buddhism runs through her songwriting, which often touches on freedom, mindfulness and impermanence. She told the Newsis interviewer in 2026 that she thinks of herself as a practitioner before she is a musician and meditates for 30 minutes before every performance. She has taken part in producing her own albums since the fourth, and her label says audiophiles often use her records for comparison listening because of the care taken over recording and mixing.

Her scope is jazz first. She has sung on the soundtracks of Korean television dramas and films (for example "Elegy" for Capital Scandal in 2007 and "Damned Love" for The Slave Hunters in 2010), taught singers who went on to pop careers, and appeared on television, and the Love, Its Longing series reworks pop songs. These are a minor part of a career that rests on jazz and blues albums, Japanese jazz-press honours, the Korean Music Awards jazz categories and her leadership of the Korea Jazz Association.