Artist of the Month
March 2010
Pauline Lim
Pauline Lim was born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1966, to parents who had immigrated from post-war Korea. Her father was a physician, and her mother was a registered nurse who was the daughter of a physician, so there was much pressure on Pauline to become a doctor. To her parents, who had lost everything in the war, it was a matter of survival. She was groomed to get into an Ivy League school from an early age, learning the piano at age 4, cello at age 7, guitar at age 8, flute at age 11, and studying voice at age 14. She took jazz, tap, ballet, and gymnastics lessons as well, and each summer was enrolled in an art program. She was expected to bring home straight A’s on every report card.
She spent her senior year of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, where she played flute in the orchestra and sang in several choral groups. She was accepted to all of the colleges to which she applied, and she enrolled at Harvard. Unfortunately, the culmination of these years being prepped to be the perfect candidate led to an immense sense of letdown when she found herself depressed and miserable despite her outward success. She drifted from major to major, Psychology to Literature to Music, and found that Harvard had a knack for draining the fun out of every subject. She contemplated suicide every day. Finally she found the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, which was Harvard’s way of saying “Art and Architecture”, where the focus was on doing rather than reading and analyzing, and she found bliss—or at least a way of getting through her undergraduate years without jumping off of a tall building. Also at this time, she started cutting all bookish classes but attending all music rehearsals and studio time—another pointer to what would be her future.
Pauline’s parents understandably flipped out when she declared that she was going to become an artist and musician after college. Where had they gone wrong? All of those lessons had been aimed at getting her into a good college so that she could become a successful doctor, not a penniless artist and musician. Today Pauline lives at the Brickbottom Artists Community and has a paid position as a soprano at S. Stephen’s Church at Brown University in Providence, RI. She also sings with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and Zefiro, acclaimed early-music vocal groups. Her artwork has been exhibited extensively in the US and in Europe. She has won numerous grants for both art and music and was recently picked to travel to Morocco as an artist/ambassador with a delegation from the City of Somerville. She has survived thus far.