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Laurie Niles

Interview with Hyun Jae Lim: a Triumphant Return to the Violin

January 29, 2026, 2:32 PM · It has been a triumphant year for 28-year-old violinist Hyun Jae Lim.

Yes, she has won first prize in two major competitions - the 2026 Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition (EOIVC) in January and the 2025 Seoul International Music Competition in December.

But far more than that, she came back to the international stage after four difficult years of healing and recovery from a near-death car accident that happened in Korea in 2020. The accident caused numerous injuries and forced her into a four-year hiatus from playing. At this point she is back to playing - and winning - competitions that require the preparation of hours of of repertoire at the highest level - and she has found new joy in playing and performing. But it was a difficult journey.

Hyun Jae Lim
Violinist Hyun Jae Lim performing in the EOIVC Finals.

"I was in the hospital for two years," Hyun Jae told me in a phone interview from Boca Raton, Fla., after winning the EOIVC. "I was damaged so much. I have a spinal cord injury, but it was not just my spine. I had to have six surgeries and procedures, and also rehab."

The accident happened in May 2020, on the day that would have been her graduation from the Curtis Institute. But the COVID pandemic had canceled the graduation that year, so she was home in Korea.

"For about six months, I was in such a critical state, I couldn't even think outside of anything other than recovery itself," Hyun Jae said. "It was life and death. I was in the ICU for two weeks. Even after a couple of weeks, I was in a really critical situation." And because of COVID, visits from family were severely limited.

"Even after I was out of the hospital, over the next two years, it was still a lot of adjustment and relearning how to cope with my new way of living," she said. "That was very, very challenging - four years with no music and no outside communications. I was mostly home. I was still going back and forth between hospital and home, and that was basically my life."

Before the accident, it had always been clear that Hyun Jae was a natural, when it came to music. Born in Seoul, Korea, she started playing the piano at the age of four. "My mom is a singer, and I think she wanted me to be a pianist early on," Hyun Jae said. She still plays the piano - "actually I play piano as well as I play the violin!"

She began violin began as more of a hobby, when she was seven years old. Her elementary school had an after-school program, and "the only reason I started was because it was so cheap - about $20 per month!"

Hyun Jae progressed with unusual speed - after only about three months, she had completed three Suzuki books. A family friend observed that her talent was special - that she should audition for Nam Yun Kim, one of South Korea's most eminent violin teachers. (Nam Yun's students have included Chee-Yun Kim, Yura Lee, Clara-Jumi Kang, Ji-Young Lim, Ji Won Song, YooJin Jang, and many others.)

BELOW: Hyun Jae Lim's Semi-final round from the EOIVC:


Hyun Jae was admitted to her studio, though she didn't get to study with her directly. "She had a whole system in her studio, sending students to younger teachers," Hyun Jae said. "I actually ended up studying with Jehye Lee." (Jehye Lee, a laureate of the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition, currently teaches at Tianjin Juilliard School and Korean National Arts University.)

"So I somehow went to audition for Nam-Yun Kim, and that's how I started playing more seriously," she said. "Then I moved to the United States about six months after I started to play the violin in Korea."

"Violin was something that was part of my everyday life," she said. "At that age, I didn't think I was going to play professionally. I was just playing it all the time, and it was so much fun. When I was young, I would stand on top of the couch at our home and play for people - which was weird, because I never wanted to play the piano in front of people! But the violin, I did."

Why? She said that in her youthful inexperience, "maybe I thought that violin was easier than the piano!"

"And the violin is so much closer to the body when you play - I think it felt more like a toy or like a doll, something that I could grab onto and hold it close to my body," she said. "It just felt really natural."

In North Carolina, Hyun Jae studied with Duke University professor Hsiao-Mei Ku and then later with University of North Carolina Professor Richard Luby.

Before the accident, Hyun Jae was already on a star path. In high school she appeared on From the Top. She had won prizes at the Menuhin Competition in Geneva, the Ima Hogg Competition, the Alfred M. Greenfield Competition, and the Singapore International Violin Competition. She had earned her Bachelor of Music degree from Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Midori Goto, Shmuel Ashkenasi, and Arnold Steinhardt.

Following the accident, she wondered whether or not she would go back to music.

"While I was not pursuing music, I was thinking about what I should do with my life. I tried to do things outside of music," she said. "At first it was just hobby things, like making crafts." She made things with Legos. She got into 3-D rendering and started a YouTube channel that was completely unrelated to music.

"I even got my parents to buy me a really high-capacity MacBook, so that I could create these 3-D videos," she said. "But it took a lot of time, even more than violin practicing. It was just so much energy." After a few months she grew tired of it and gave up.

"I was trying different things, but I kept realizing that these other things were not for me," she said. "People around me - my friends, my mom's friends, my teacher - they would try to tell me that I had to play music again."

"Then one day I thought, maybe I should start teaching, because teaching would be more approachable than physically playing and performing," she said. "I had not done a lot of teaching, but I'd had good experiences with teaching before. I knew that I really enjoyed teaching."

So she started teaching violin to middle school and elementary school children.

"When I started teaching, I really found joy in being inside the music again," Hyun Jae said. "And when you start teaching, you kind of have to force yourself to play again. I thought, oh wait, now I have to practice! So I started to practice, bit by bit."

It was a natural progression - "I started to practice, to actually practice," she said. "This was around June 2024 - exactly four years after my accident."

She was teaching the Tchaikovsky concerto, and so she tried playing that.

"In the beginning - maybe because I'm a fast learner or because I knew the piece so well - I thought: technically, I don't really have so many issues!" she said. "But then, as weeks passed by, after a couple months, I realized there were so many things I had been forgetting. I hadn't been playing or listening to anyone - so I didn't have that objectivity of sound."

"I'm still working on finding the most ideal way of playing, so that I can feel the most comfortable as I can," she said. "I wouldn't say I'm at 100 percent yet, but this has been the most ideal way I have been able to find, as of now."

"But even to get to this point, I had to learn so much. I had never played sitting down, and I had to learn how to sit down while I was playing," she said. "But it's not sitting down, as a normal person. I can't move my legs. So for example, I had this issue with my bow usage because my knees would get in the way. And I couldn't position my legs like Itzhak Perlman does - we have different situations. It made me so frustrated, in so many ways."

Hyun Jae Lim and Elmar Oliveira
Violinists Elmar Oliveira and Hyun Jae Lim, at the EOIVC Awards Presentation.

"That was one of the hardest things about me trying to play again," she said. "I couldn't focus on music only. I had to think about all of these new things that I had never thought about before."

She even had to think about what to wear, performing. "I stopped wearing dresses, it's just not comfortable for me," she said.

Re-learning to play the violin allowed her to "re-think what music is about, from the fundamentals," Hyun Jae said. "It gave me a chance not to miss anything that I had been missing out before, not to stray away from even one little thing. Violin playing is so complicated, it's so hard to think about so many things at once."

BELOW: Hyun Jae Lim's Preliminary round from the EOIVC:


Currently Hyun Jae is living in Philadelphia working at Curtis with Midori, who has helped her enormously in recovering her violin technique and performance skills.

"As soon as I decided to get back to playing again, I wrote to Midori and sought her help," Hyun Jae said. "Without her, I wouldn't have been able to do any of this. It would have been just impossible."

And another thing that is different now: Hyun Jae puts more time into general exercise and physical therapy than she puts into violin practicing every day. She has to.

"It's very time-consuming, the exercises that I do every day. And I try to put in two hours every day to do standing exercises," she said. "The exercises are crucial to my violin playing now. I can't ignore them. It's more important than playing a couple of notes."

As a result, "I don't have as much time anymore for practice," she said. That has changed her approach to practice. "I used to have to really warm up, and I had to practice a certain number of hours to do this or that. I think I'm still a perfectionist, but with such limits now, I can see that that 'time practicing' isn't everything. With the approach I have now, I put more thought into my music - what I want to show about the music, and what I want to want others to feel about my playing."

"I am really happy these days, not because I'm winning all these competitions, but I'm finding joy in the music I'm playing," she said. "I think I am most happy when I'm practicing. It sounds really weird, coming out of my mouth, even for myself! I've never felt so happy before, practicing!

"It comes from this realization that I had over the past several years, that my life and my music are very closely tied together, and one cannot go without the other," she said. "As much as I find joy in my life, I can put that into my music and vice-versa. I think that's the reason why I am so very happy, even just playing for myself in the practice room."

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