Busan, South Korea.

Home cooking, writing, learning foreign languages.

Believe in yourself and play fearlessly when performing, but when at practice, be humble!

When my quartet won the first prize at the Wigmore Hall String Quartet Competition, my life dramatically changed and started living as an active performer.

I am fascinated with public speaking and I love having a good conversation with interesting people. So perhaps a television show host or a producer!

I started playing the piano first at age 5, and the violin at age 7. At first, I wanted to become a pianist, but my piano teacher was quite scary, and I cried a lot after my piano lessons. But then when I met my violin teacher, Sunny Lee, the director of Seoul Central Conservatory, she was so warm and caring that she really inspired me to love music. A good teacher can be a big influence indeed in one’s life and I would like to try to be the kind of teacher who can inspire my students.

I always wanted to lead a project called <open call for female composers> where my quartet hosts an open audition for any female composers who would like to write good quartet music and perform them. Hopefully it can become a realization soon!

When a performer has something interesting to say about music, and the audience is open-minded about that story-telling style of music, it can be very spiritual and mesmerizing!

My quartet will soon perform Absolute Jest by John Adams with John Adams himself conducting in Tokyo. Really excited about that! Also, performing Schubert's Quintet in C Major with the cellist Lynn Harrell was memorable. 

I have two recordings on Alpha Classics Label with my Esmé Quartet. The first one is called To Be Loved, which consists of all the first string quartets from Beethoven, Frank Bridge, and Unsuk Chin. Then the second one is called Yessori, which means "sound from the past" in Korean. It includes one Korean work which is about Haegeum, the Korean traditional string instrument.

I do a lot of score studies. So I spend a lot of time thinking about music rather than physical practice. But of course some scales (three octaves, thirds and octaves) and different etudes a day are not a bad way to warm up before getting to repertoires for the performance.