Title: HAN SAN, “Blue Oceans- White Oyster”
Commission: 2005
Completed: 2012
Instrumentation: string quartet
Premiere Location: Samsung Hall, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Premiere Ensemble: Boromeo String Quartet
Notes:

Hi Kyung Kim is a composer noted for her creative unification of contemporary Western and traditional Korean musical vocabularies into an original musical voice. Described by the Washington Post as a master of Asian and Western genre-blending, Kim received an international education, earning a B.A. from Seoul National University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. At UC Berkeley she received the Ladd Prix de Paris, which enabled her extended studies at IRCAM and at École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1988–1990). Her teachers include Andrew Imbrie, Olly Wilson, Gérard Grisey and Sung-Jae Lee. Since 1992 she has been a Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

At UC Santa Cruz, Kim has been the artistic director of the Pacific Rim Music Festival since its inception in 1996. The festival, an innovative celebration of new music, has gained international recognition for bringing together both Eastern and Western performers and composers at the forefront of their fields in the creation of new musical works.

Her honors include Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission at the Library of Congress, Fromm Music Foundation Commission, Meet the Composer/Commissioning USA grant, Arts Council Korea grant, Fulbright Senior Scholar awards, the Asian Cultural Council and the Korea Foundation grants, as well as grants from the University of California Inter-Campus Arts Program, which made possible the establishment of the Pacific Rim Music Festival.