When folks describe Rutherford Chang’s work, you hear phrases like: obsessive, conceptual, minimalist. These descriptions aren’t improper, they level to one thing actual in his apply. However additionally they miss what makes his strategy distinctive. Chang labored with objects that industrial tradition designed to be equivalent: information pressed in hundreds of thousands of copies, portraits drawn in line with strict home fashion, cash minted for good interchange. His curiosity lay within the exact second when the promise of sameness begins to fail, when time and human dealing with depart marks that rework supposedly equivalent objects into singular issues.
The retrospective Rutherford Chang: A whole bunch and Hundreds opened January 17, 2026 at UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork in Beijing, one among China’s main establishments for up to date artwork. This exhibition is critical for a number of causes. It represents Chang’s first institutional retrospective and his most complete solo presentation to this point. It is usually a posthumous one. Chang died in 2025 on the age of 45, abandoning a physique of labor constructed nearly solely across the apply of accumulating and arranging mass-produced objects till their particular person histories turned seen and legible.
Beijing offers a becoming location for this retrospective, although not for the plain causes alone. Sure, Chang moved steadily between New York and China all through his profession, and sure, he confirmed work in Beijing early on. However the metropolis itself presents one thing extra particular: a context formed by fast cycles of development and substitute, by the fixed acceleration of change and circulation. In such an atmosphere, Chang’s affected person consideration to what will get left behind, to the residues and traces that accumulate on objects whilst they transfer by programs designed to maintain them uniform, takes on specific resonance. The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Tinari, director of UCCA, and Aki Sasamoto, a fellow artist – each longtime associates of Chang who perceive his working strategies from the within. Their collaboration retains the exhibition near the work as apply, with course of and methodology within the foreground.
To grasp Chang’s strategy, we have to look fastidiously on the exhibition’s title. A whole bunch and Hundreds seems like easy measurement, like a gesture towards quantification. Chang sometimes labored at scale. He collected not dozens however a whole bunch or 1000’s of examples. However what the title actually describes is a technique and a selected means of working that emerges once you interact with mass-produced objects at ample quantity. Chang found that amount, at a sure level, stops behaving in predictable methods. At a sure scale, repetition begins to disclose element. Put a whole bunch of almost equivalent objects subsequent to one another and also you begin to see time. You begin to see contact. You see accidents. You see storage. You see neglect. You additionally see care. The marks of particular person dealing with turn out to be seen. What you’re taking a look at, finally, is a report of lived life pressed into objects that industrial tradition designed to maintain secure and interchangeable.
We Purchase White Albums
One in all Chang’s best-known tasks demonstrates this methodology with specific readability. We Purchase White Albums operates from a constraint easy sufficient to state in a single sentence, although its implications unfold over years: Chang established a report retailer that stocked solely first pressings of the Beatles’ The Beatles (1968), generally often known as “The White Album”. The shop had one rule that inverted regular industrial logic: It bought nothing, it solely purchased.
This premise is intentionally slim, and it stays slim all through the mission’s length, which seems to be a part of what permits it to scale so successfully over time. Throughout exhibitions the place Chang was current, the work functioned in actual time: folks might present up with their very own copy of the White Album and promote it to the archive whereas the exhibition was on view. The act of shopping for turned a second of direct trade between the work and its viewers, and the archive grew by these particular person transactions as an alternative of curatorial choice or market acquisition. Every copy arrived already marked by years of dealing with. These marks, the accrued proof of circulation, carried the work ahead.
To grasp why this mission works because it does, we have to look extra fastidiously on the White Album itself as an object. Richard Hamilton designed the quilt as an nearly fully clean white floor. Minimalism at its most reductive type. And but early pressings carry a stamped serial quantity, a small element that complicates the obvious simplicity. This serial quantity performs a curious double perform: it frames every copy as one amongst many (your copy is quantity 0234561 out of hundreds of thousands), whereas concurrently gesturing towards one thing like restricted version standing by the very act of numbering. Right here we discover the contradiction constructed immediately into the item itself: mass-produced minimalism making a paradoxical declare to uniqueness. The serial quantity tells you this is only one copy out of hundreds of thousands, whereas the clean white cowl invitations you to make it yours.
Chang understood what this contradiction units in movement as soon as these objects enter circulation and start transferring by time. The clear white floor that Hamilton designed with such care doesn’t keep clear for lengthy. On a regular basis life rewrites it. Water harm spreads throughout the cardboard in irregular patterns. Corners get torn or bent by careless dealing with or too-tight shelving. House owners write their names on the quilt, add notes about when and the place they purchased the album, typically embrace dedications or detailed lists of favourite tracks. Value stickers from second-hand outlets accumulate in layers, creating unintended collages of economic historical past. In some instances, mildew units in throughout storage in damp basements or attics, creating natural patterns that may look nearly intentional, or let’s imagine, nearly inventive. Via all of this, the album stops being a uniform industrial product and turns into one thing singular, that’s marked by its specific historical past.
The choice to gather these albums in any situation and never looking out just for pristine, museum-quality copies, represents a selection with important penalties for the way the work means. It means treating harm and put on as data and never as degradation to be corrected or restored. This shift in how we worth objects is essential to understanding the mission. A pristine copy would possibly let you know one thing about cautious preservation, about somebody who valued the item sufficient to maintain it shielded from the world. However a tattered copy, coated in stains and marks, tells a special and possibly richer story. In Chang’s arms, these marks stay seen and start to matter in new methods. He returns time and again, throughout totally different tasks, to this exact level the place objects designed for good interchange begin to fray on the edges, the place they start to hold their very own report of circulation that makes them individually readable.
The work doesn’t cease with bodily assortment, nevertheless. Chang took the mission a step additional by recording a number of copies of the album and layering them right into a single audio piece. 100 variations of the White Album play concurrently, drifting steadily out of sync as small variations in high quality and accrued put on compound right into a shifting refrain of sound. The end result doesn’t register as a remix or a mashup in any standard sense. It feels nearer to the archive itself made audible, a means of listening to how uniformity fails once you stack sufficient iterations on prime of one another. What involves the floor isn’t purity or constancy to an authentic, however time itself, materialized within the type of friction and noise. The piece features as what we would name materials reminiscence, with surprisingly little curiosity in fan tradition, or the mythology that sometimes surrounds The Beatles.
The Class of 2008
Chang utilized this identical fundamental methodological strategy to a really totally different type of mass-produced object: printed information media. The Class of 2008 presents itself as a simple catalogue. It’s an alphabetical itemizing of each hedcut portrait printed in The Wall Avenue Journal through the 12 months 2008. Earlier than we are able to perceive what Chang does with this materials, although, we have to perceive what hedcuts are and why they matter. Hedcuts are the distinctive stippled, engraving-style portraits that the Journal makes use of for sure figures in its reporting. The method is borrowed intentionally from nineteenth-century engraving, and it carries with it particular associations: authority, permanence, trustworthiness, the visible register of one thing meant to carry up underneath scrutiny and stand the take a look at of time.
The construction of {the catalogue} is deceptively easy: alphabetical order, with repetition saved seen within the report. If somebody appeared a number of occasions in 2008, that is clearly indicated within the e-book, and people appearances are explicitly not diminished to a single consultant entry. This resolution about find out how to set up the fabric issues, as a result of it permits patterns of repetition and recurrence to emerge by the reader’s encounter with the work. And the timing of the mission sharpens its implications significantly. 2008 was, after all as everyone knows, the 12 months when monetary authority got here underneath extraordinary pressure, when financial buildings that had appeared most secure revealed themselves to be fragile and even illusory. And but all through this era, the visible language of legitimacy within the Journal continued with out interruption, day after day rendering sure faces on this specific register of authority and belief.
Chang’s catalogue merely information this continuity with out including editorial commentary or express critique. The alphabetical group flattens any narrative arc that the 12 months’s occasions would possibly recommend. There’s no chronological story being instructed about disaster and response, no hierarchy of significance imposed by the order of presentation. As an alternative, repetition itself does the interpretive work. As you web page by the e-book, you discover who seems as soon as and who seems time and again and once more. You begin to see patterns in who will get rendered on this authoritative visible register and who stays exterior it. The hedcut turns into not only a impartial strategy of illustration however a query about legitimacy and illustration: who will get marked as value this specific type of consideration, who will get enrolled on this visible vocabulary of permanence and authority, and who stays invisible to this institutional gaze?
Recreation Boy Tetris
If Chang’s accumulating tasks make time seen by the gradual accumulation of marks on bodily objects, Recreation Boy Tetris approaches the query of time and repetition by a special medium: labor itself, because the repetitive effort of attempting and failing and attempting once more. The work paperwork Chang’s repeated makes an attempt to attain the best potential rating within the authentic Recreation Boy model of Tetris, filming the method over an prolonged interval till the buildup of makes an attempt turns into the substance and which means of the work. At one level throughout this prolonged engagement, he surpassed Steve Wozniak’s rating on the leaderboard. A element he famous with evident satisfaction –– a reminder of how significantly he took questions of record-keeping and documented proof of accomplishment.
The identical easy rule-based system holds your consideration by lengthy stretches of focus punctuated by failure and the choice to restart. The will for completion, for reaching some definitive endpoint, retains pulling you again into the loop whilst the explanations for persevering with turn out to be more durable to articulate. Progress stays measurable all through — you may monitor enchancment throughout makes an attempt, watch abilities growing and patterns rising — even because the bigger which means or goal of this progress begins to slide away, even because the query of why this specific rating issues turns into more and more troublesome to reply with any conviction.
Chang wasn’t observing obsessive cultures or completionist practices from a protected essential distance, making work about accumulating or repetition with out genuinely taking part in these buildings himself. As an alternative, he constructed programs and constraints that might take in years of his personal consideration and energy whereas nonetheless persevering with to demand extra. Over time, by this sustained and real engagement with repetitive buildings, Chang himself begins to resemble the factor he’s ostensibly finding out. He turns into, in an actual sense, a type of repetitive system himself as lived apply.
CENTS
Chang’s remaining main mission takes his long-standing curiosity in models, requirements, and programs of record-keeping and extends it into what has turn out to be an ongoing and in some methods autonomous situation. He accomplished the bodily assortment and documentation of ten thousand copper cents in 2023, at a second when the one-cent coin was nonetheless in common circulation all through the US. In 2024 the digital information of those ten thousand particular person cash had been inscribed onto Bitcoin, permitting the work to proceed circulating and accumulating which means past Chang’s direct management or intervention. Then, in a growth that offers all the mission an one other historic dimension, the U.S. Mint stopped producing the circulating one-cent coin on November 12, 2025. What this implies is that in hindsight, with the angle that historic distance offers, the penny itself has begun to learn as a historic object, one thing that belongs to a selected second of foreign money and trade that’s now passing into the previous.
The mission begins, like most of Chang’s work, from a situation that many individuals vaguely learn about however hardly ever assume by with any care or precision. Chang restricted his assortment particularly to cents minted earlier than 1982, the 12 months when the U.S. Mint modified the composition of the penny to scale back prices. Earlier than 1982, pennies had been made primarily of copper; after that date, they turned copper-plated zinc. This seemingly minor element has actual penalties: pennies from the precedent days can, underneath sure market circumstances, exceed their face worth when thought-about purely as uncooked materials. The copper content material is perhaps value multiple cent. This creates an odd scenario the place the State continues to outline every coin as being value precisely one cent (and makes melting them for his or her steel content material unlawful), whereas the fabric actuality of the item suggests a special worth solely. Chang doesn’t deal with this as a paradox to resolve or an issue to unravel. He treats it as a given, as one of many structural circumstances that makes the work potential and attention-grabbing.
The method he developed is methodical and systematic. He eliminated ten thousand copper cents from circulation, pulling them out of the circulate of trade and use, and documented every one individually by detailed pictures (obverse and reverse, higher often known as heads and tails). The cash had been then smelted collectively right into a single copper block weighing sixty-eight kilos. At this second, particular person models disappear solely into undifferentiated mass. The penny’s unusual position in trade, its perform as a discrete unit of worth that may flow into and mix with different models, involves a definitive finish. However the block itself continues to exist in a number of types. It was rendered as an in depth 3D digital mannequin and inscribed as a single huge inscription filling everything of Bitcoin block #839969. This digital model was then bought at Christie’s in 2024, coming into one more system of worth and circulation, transferring from materials object to digital report to collectible paintings within the up to date artwork market.
The documentation, in the meantime, strikes in the wrong way from this consolidation. Whereas the bodily cash condense right into a single unified object and lose their existence as separable, countable models, every particular person cent stays readable as a definite report. The photographic pictures keep separate and individuated, every one assigned to a hard and fast and everlasting place within the set by inscription onto particular person satoshis. What disappears fully on the stage of fabric type — you may not maintain these specific ten thousand pennies in your hand, can not kind by them or organize them or put them again into circulation — stays completely intact on the stage of the report. You’ll be able to nonetheless have a look at the {photograph} of every particular coin, nonetheless look at the actual put on patterns and floor marks and small imperfections that distinguished it from the 9 thousand 9 hundred and ninety-nine others.
This construction permits CENTS to carry in rigidity a number of totally different and probably conflicting concepts about the place worth is situated and the way it will get established and maintained. There’s worth as outlined by governmental authority: the State declares that this coin is value one cent, and that declaration carries authorized pressure. There’s worth registered in materials composition: the copper content material would possibly really be value multiple cent when calculated in line with commodity costs. And there’s worth produced by preservation and documentation: the choice to {photograph} every coin individually, to keep up the archive’s legibility over time, to deal with these mass-produced objects as worthy of sustained consideration. These totally different registers of worth stay distinct inside the work, not collapsing right into a single unified which means or resolving into some synthesis.
After we place CENTS alongside We Purchase White Albums and take into consideration them as a part of a constant apply, the underlying logic turns into clear. Objects that had been designed and manufactured for good interchange, for being functionally equivalent and mutually substitutable, turn out to be readable as singular and particular person as soon as their circulation is interrupted and held nonetheless, as soon as their specific histories are made seen by cautious documentation and systematic archiving.
It’s value noting right here — as a result of it issues for understanding how the work continues to perform after Chang’s demise — that CENTS was initiated by collaboration with Sovrn Artwork, an impartial, artist-first platform that offered the preliminary framework and assist for the mission’s growth. After the total inscription of the work onto Bitcoin was accomplished, a council shaped independently of Chang himself, with out his group or oversight. This council is made up of collectors who selected, for their very own causes, to take duty for the work’s continuation and interpretation. The council members come from totally different generations and totally different skilled fields, bringing numerous types of experience and perspective to their engagement with the archive. Their work has centered persistently on retaining the distinctions inside the archive seen and legible — by shut studying of the documentation, by cautious cataloguing of variations and patterns, by writing that approaches the fabric from a number of angles and asks totally different sorts of questions. Their involvement has centered significantly on the issue of find out how to hold this archive readable and significant over time, find out how to preserve the precision and care of the report because it continues to flow into by programs and contexts that Chang himself couldn’t have anticipated.
Archive as Observe
It’s straightforward to name Rutherford obsessive. The sustained consideration over years, the dedication to completeness and thoroughness, the willingness to spend huge quantities of effort and time on tasks constructed round intentionally slim constraints. The phrase isn’t inaccurate. And but it nonetheless manages to overlook one thing vital concerning the dimension of what Chang was really doing along with his time and a spotlight. He handled mass tradition and industrial manufacturing with a type of endurance that’s uncommon in up to date artwork. He made rarity and singularity seen inside exactly these issues we’ve discovered to miss or dismiss as generic and interchangeable. He listened fastidiously to what we would name the noise inside acquainted symbols and objects — the small variations and accrued marks that circulation and dealing with inscribe on surfaces that had been designed particularly to withstand such marking and stay secure over time.
This consideration to what accumulates within the gaps and margins of programs designed for uniformity helps clarify why A whole bunch and Hundreds works so successfully as a title for this retrospective. On one stage, it merely names the dimensions at which Chang characteristically labored: accumulating not dozens however a whole bunch, not a whole bunch however 1000’s of examples. Nevertheless it additionally names one thing extra elementary. A self-discipline, a selected type of methodical apply that requires wanting lengthy sufficient and thoroughly sufficient that distinction begins to look inside what first presents itself as sameness. The apply retains returning, with outstanding consistency throughout totally different tasks and supplies, to what circulation leaves behind: the marks and traces that accumulate even on objects designed to stay secure and unchanged.
Chang’s work might be learn, in some ways, as a sustained apply of custody and care. He saved objects, pulled them out of circulation or gathered them from its margins. He listed and arranged them into programs that made their particular person histories newly seen and legible. After which, crucially, he returned them to circulation in altered type: as archives open to examination, as exhibitions that invited direct encounter, as everlasting information inscribed on Bitcoin. Via this course of, he constructed conditions and buildings through which circulation itself turns into seen as a course of. During which worth turns concrete and measurable. The archive is persistently the place this transformation takes place in his work — the positioning and the tactic by which particular person objects turn out to be readable as elements of bigger programs and patterns.
The retrospective gathers Chang’s methodology right into a single body and brings collectively tasks from totally different moments in his profession to exhibit the underlying consistency of his strategy throughout numerous supplies and contexts. What stays is the construction he constructed, the archives he assembled with such care, the questions he persistently refused to resolve or shut down prematurely. The promise of sameness retains failing. Distinction retains showing within the gaps and variations. The marks keep seen for anybody keen to look carefully sufficient, and patiently sufficient, to really see them.
This can be a visitor publish by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are solely their very own and don’t essentially replicate these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
