Hellooo. It is a Wednesday in January 2026 and I’m listening to Anne Hathaway’s I Dreamed A Dream on loop while I write this. Tickets are now live for the IOWA album release show. It will be held Friday 3/6 at the Stone Circle Theater, a beautiful church in Ridgewood, NYC! Bitepoint (aka tattoo artist pang.ink) will be doing an atmospheric DJ set, followed by a live ambient performance from one of my favorite artists YATTA, and then I’ll be doing a special playthrough of the record in collaboration with performance artist Jas Lin. Also thanks to Trans Music Archive, we’ll have amazing food by chef Jessie YuChen provided for free/donation. I hope you come, tickets are $25 but it is notaflof so let us know if you cannot afford and we will send you a discount code.

The show is a fundraiser event for the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund which distributes critical resources in a state that has banned gender affirming care for minors, removed transgender civil rights protections, and eliminated gender affirming care for transgender Iowans on Medicaid.

Hope to see you there! Ticket Link

I released the first single all dolls go to heaven last week, including a music video (in a series of many) where I’m moving through different Iowa landscapes. It was shot with my friend Patrick O’Connor in Iowa City. I hope you enjoy.

A writer from Paste shared the following blurb which was very nice:

OHYUNG: “all dolls go to heaven”

Between the exquisite You Are Always On My Mind and the delicate dressings of her Sorry, Baby score, OHYUNG was my most important artist of 2025. Lia Ouyang Rusli makes sounds that have stayed so wonderfully present in my body, and “all dolls go to heaven” stacks more on top of them. The song awakens IOWA, OHYUNG’s new record that documents the year she spent in Iowa City composing the music for Neo Sora’s Happyend and Eva Victor’s aforementioned, Oscar-shortlisted directorial debut. A detour from the pop exhibitions of You Are Always On My Mind, “all dolls go to heaven” approximates stillness. OHYUNG chopped up Christian choral music and ran it and doses of synths, stock presets, and field recordings through cassette tapes and tube compressors to make it. Rusli calls IOWA her “experimental trans Bruce Springsteen Nebraska.” I can’t quite get over the loping tape hiss or the hymns that rise and fall like this tempered, breathing chest. “all dolls go to heaven” sweeps through the sea-level holy, uncouples from its textures, and climbs into the mouth of a liberated afterlife. —Matt Mitchell

I like the last sentence. Every day I try to liberate myself in some way, long before any afterlife. Sometimes I fail, like when I was spinning at the Lot Radio on Monday and while I was waiting for my time I was outside in the snow listening to the previous DJ, and I really wanted to dance but some of the DJs friends were looking at me so I didn’t. But sometimes I succeed like telling whoever reads my newsletter that I like listening to Anne Hathaway sing melodrama on repeat!!

Much love to everyone in Minnesota battling ICE and this rotten fascist country. If New Yorkers are trying to get involved locally one thing I think would be directly helpful is getting involved with Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, who is fighting to get Crye Precision, a company supplying ICE and border patrol with military-grade gear and equipment, evicted from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. ICE is being supplied right in our backyard, what will we do about it?

Thank you for following along. I plan on writing more in this space. Do you have things you’d like to hear from me? Art process thoughts? Recommendations? Insecurities? Dreams? I’d love to hear yours as well.

<3 Lia