JIJI Guitar
Nostalgia Jeonnam Music Festival
Jeonnam Arts High School
Mokpo
May 23, 2026
(Jisu Sheen recently moved from New Haven to Gwangju, South Korea, where she’s covering local arts and culture for the New Haven Independent and Midbrow.)
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved Baskin Robbins. She grew up to become a world-class guitarist with green streaks in her hair. I met her in the hazy 2010s in New Haven, and again on Saturday in a Korean city by the water.
Ji Yeon Kim, known on stage as JIJI, was playing the penultimate set in the Nostalgia Jeonnam Music Festival in Mokpo, in the south of Jeonnam Province. She came out in a ruffled mint-colored dress, grass-green pants, and teal hair highlights. (She wanted to look like a tree, she told me later.)
It had been a decade since we last saw each other at Kim's pink house by Stop & Shop off Whalley Avenue. I remember her waving from her front stoop. She was fermenting food and giving me clothes.
At the Nostalgia Jeonnam Music Festival, Kim started with her eyes closed, building up waves of emotion. She was playing Isaac Albéniz's "Prelude – Asturias (Leyenda)," a classical Spanish guitar piece with melodies falling in constant cascades, then stopping for fractions of a second in dramatic chords.
She took the audience through a variety of styles, showing just what the guitar is capable of and letting its sounds ring out like mist over the concert hall. At points, Kim smiled to herself, like there were inside jokes between her and her guitar. In her final piece on the set list, "Litli Askr" by Gulli Björnsson, her hand danced across the guitar in long arcs after each delicate high note.
The crowd didn't let her leave at the end of her official set. They kept clapping until she came back for an encore. Kim connected her guitar to a pedalboard and told us the story behind her next piece, an original.
When she was little, growing up in Korea, she was obsessed with Baskin Robbins. To this day, she can retrace her exact path to the ice cream store. Exit the apartment, pass the playground, go around a building, pass another playground...the route rolled easily off her tongue, a precursor to the rhythm of the piece itself.
Growing up, Kim liked pop, punk, and jazz. She listened to Radiohead. "I wanted to be in a band," she said to the crowd.
Instead, Kim came to the U.S. as a teen and soon became one of the first guitarists at the renowned Curtis Music School in Philadelphia. She finished school at Yale School of Music in New Haven, and started teaching in Arizona and now Indiana, at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. She's been praised by the Washington Post as “one of the 21 composers/performers who sound like tomorrow."
She had only spent a couple days in Mokpo when I saw her Saturday, but she already knew enough to show me around the port city. She walked me through the traces of Japanese colonization and the situation of young people trying to make it in the current economic environment.
On stage, introducing her encore piece, Kim asked the audience to imagine their favorite snack so they could listen with those sweet thoughts in mind. She had named the piece after her favorite Baskin Robbins flavor: "Very Berry Strawberry."
Kim's focus on the details of her story—down to the flavor she liked and the route she took—felt like she was bending down to meet her child self at eye level.
Memory lane isn't a one-way street. You can listen to your old self, and you can also say something back. Her piece held the freshness of childhood and the space of the gap in between now and then, all at once. It was a portal to a forever fuzzy memory.
Kim used her pedalboard to loop and hold elements, and the frosty click of the buttons themselves added an analog crackle of nostalgia. Notes jumped in quick, light succession, like a child rushing to the ice cream store.
After, fans approached her signing table one by one. Many were kids, swallowing their hesitations as they repeated their names in quiet voices. Kim leaned in, attentive. In her colorful dress, listening patiently to get each person's name right, she was like a fairytale princess.
Later that evening, Kim, her parents, and I shared convenience store snacks and talked over the sound of a soccer match on TV. Kim showed me a can of food for the stray cats in the neighborhood where she was staying. She had gotten familiar with each of the whiskered characters in the area. One cat was savvy enough to get cuts of fish from the market.
We dug into a special sweet treat: strawberry ice cream, in honor of the Very Berry Strawberry encore piece. Just another day in the life of guitar royalty.
