Oan Kim

At the age of 5, his mother put him on the violin (it was that or the cello), which he played for the next 15 years.

As a teenager, he developed a passion for jazz and took up the alto saxophone, then the tenor, which he perfected under Julien Loureau.

Convinced that he also had to be a good pianist to become a composer, he studied jazz piano at the Bill Evans Piano Academy under Samy Abenhaïm and Philippe Le Barrelec.

He became fascinated by contemporary music, followed Pierre Boulez's lectures at the Collège de France, studied the scores of Berio, Nono, Ferneyhough, Xenakis, Cage, and frequently attended concerts and lectures at the IRCAM contemporary music center.

At the same time, he studied classical composition at the CSNM in Paris, studying harmony, orchestration, counterpoint, fugue, and also classical Indian music.

Since then he has composed music for the audiovisual industry (documentary and television) and for contemporary art, collaborating regularly with the artist Jungwan Bae and the photographers of the MYOP agency.

Enthused by the indie scene, he decided to participate in it and created the rock band Film Noir (releasing one album with Le Son du Maquis), then the electro-rock duo Chinese Army (releasing three EPs on the label Balades Sonores and Believe Digital) that he formed with the guitarist Benoît Perraudeau. With these two formations he played more than 80 concerts in France and abroad.

Since 2019 he is back to the jazz saxophone with a new project that the pandemic pushed him to develop as a solo project, weaving jazz and modern music together, somewhere between Pharoah Sanders and Radiohead.

In parallel to his musical activities Kim has also pursued a career as a photographer and documentary filmmaker. He has received several awards both in photography and film (Swiss Life 4 Hands Award, Silver Horn of the Krakow Film Festival, Emerging Documentary Filmmaker at DMZ festival, Nuits Photographiques Festival Award, Tomorrow's Artist Prize Sungkok Museum), and is a co-founding member of the MYOP agency, one of the foremost photo agencies in France.

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