When folks describe Rutherford Chang’s work, you hear phrases like: obsessive, conceptual, minimalist. These descriptions aren’t fallacious, they level to one thing actual in his follow. However in addition they miss what makes his strategy distinctive. Chang labored with objects that industrial tradition designed to be similar: data pressed in tens of millions of copies, portraits drawn based on strict home model, cash minted for excellent 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 similar objects into singular issues.
The retrospective Rutherford Chang: Lots of and 1000’s opened January 17, 2026 at UCCA Heart for Up to date Artwork in Beijing, one in all 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 up to now. Additionally it is a posthumous one. Chang died in 2025 on the age of 45, forsaking a physique of labor constructed nearly totally across the follow of gathering and arranging mass-produced objects till their particular person histories turned seen and legible.
Beijing supplies a becoming location for this retrospective, although not for the plain causes alone. Sure, Chang moved continuously between New York and China all through his profession, and sure, he confirmed work in Beijing early on. However the metropolis itself affords 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 way of methods 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 buddies of Chang who perceive his working strategies from the within. Their collaboration retains the exhibition near the work as follow, with course of and technique within the foreground.
To grasp Chang’s strategy, we have to look rigorously on the exhibition’s title. Lots of and 1000’s appears like easy measurement, like a gesture towards quantification. Chang usually 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 whenever you interact with mass-produced objects at enough 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 similar 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 develop into seen. What you’re taking a look at, in the end, is a file of lived life pressed into objects that industrial tradition designed to maintain steady and interchangeable.
We Purchase White Albums
Considered one of Chang’s best-known initiatives demonstrates this technique 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 file retailer that stocked solely first pressings of the Beatles’ The Beatles (1968), generally referred to as “The White Album”. The shop had one rule that inverted regular business logic: It offered nothing, it solely purchased.
This premise is intentionally slender, and it stays slender all through the venture’s period, 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 alternate between the work and its viewers, and the archive grew by way of these particular person transactions as a substitute of curatorial choice or market acquisition. Every copy arrived already marked by years of dealing with. These marks, the amassed proof of circulation, carried the work ahead.
To grasp why this venture works because it does, we have to look extra rigorously on the White Album itself as an object. Richard Hamilton designed the quilt as an nearly utterly 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 tens of millions), whereas concurrently gesturing towards one thing like restricted version standing by way of the very act of numbering. Right here we discover the contradiction constructed instantly into the thing itself: mass-produced minimalism making a paradoxical declare to uniqueness. The serial quantity tells you this is only one copy out of tens of millions, 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 way of 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 way of careless dealing with or too-tight shelving. Homeowners 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. Worth stickers from second-hand retailers accumulate in layers, creating unintended collages of economic historical past. In some circumstances, mould units in throughout storage in damp basements or attics, creating natural patterns that may look nearly intentional, or shall we say, nearly creative. By 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 just for pristine, museum-quality copies, represents a alternative with important penalties for a way the work means. It means treating harm and put on as info and never as degradation to be corrected or restored. This shift in how we worth objects is essential to understanding the venture. A pristine copy may let you know one thing about cautious preservation, about somebody who valued the thing sufficient to maintain it shielded from the world. However a tattered copy, lined in stains and marks, tells a special and doubtless richer story. In Chang’s palms, these marks stay seen and start to matter in new methods. He returns repeatedly, throughout totally different initiatives, to this exact level the place objects designed for excellent interchange begin to fray on the edges, the place they start to hold their very own file of circulation that makes them individually readable.
The work doesn’t cease with bodily assortment, nonetheless. Chang took the venture 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 amassed 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 whenever you stack sufficient iterations on prime of one another. What involves the floor shouldn’t be purity or constancy to an authentic, however time itself, materialized within the type of friction and noise. The piece features as what we’d name materials reminiscence, with surprisingly little curiosity in fan tradition, or the mythology that usually surrounds The Beatles.
The Class of 2008
Chang utilized this similar fundamental methodological strategy to a really totally different sort 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 Road Journal through the 12 months 2008. Earlier than we will 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 below scrutiny and stand the check of time.
The construction of {the catalogue} is deceptively easy: alphabetical order, with repetition stored seen within the file. If somebody appeared a number of instances in 2008, that is clearly indicated within the guide, and people appearances are explicitly not diminished to a single consultant entry. This resolution about the way to set up the fabric issues, as a result of it permits patterns of repetition and recurrence to emerge by way of the reader’s encounter with the work. And the timing of the venture sharpens its implications significantly. 2008 was, in fact as everyone knows, the 12 months when monetary authority got here below extraordinary pressure, when financial buildings that had appeared most steady 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 data this continuity with out including editorial commentary or express critique. The alphabetical group flattens any narrative arc that the 12 months’s occasions may counsel. There’s no chronological story being advised about disaster and response, no hierarchy of significance imposed by way of the order of presentation. As an alternative, repetition itself does the interpretive work. As you web page by way of the guide, you discover who seems as soon as and who seems repeatedly 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 price this specific sort 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 gathering initiatives make time seen by way of the gradual accumulation of marks on bodily objects, Recreation Boy Tetris approaches the query of time and repetition by way of a special medium: labor itself, because the repetitive effort of making an attempt and failing and making an attempt once more. The work paperwork Chang’s repeated makes an attempt to realize the very best attainable 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 that 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 critically he took questions of record-keeping and documented proof of accomplishment.
The identical easy rule-based system holds your consideration by way of 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 develop into more durable to articulate. Progress stays measurable all through — you possibly can observe enchancment throughout makes an attempt, watch expertise growing and patterns rising — even because the bigger that means or objective of this progress begins to slide away, even because the query of why this specific rating issues turns into more and more tough to reply with any conviction.
Chang wasn’t observing obsessive cultures or completionist practices from a protected crucial distance, making work about gathering or repetition with out genuinely collaborating in these buildings himself. As an alternative, he constructed methods and constraints that would take in years of his personal consideration and energy whereas nonetheless persevering with to demand extra. Over time, by way of this sustained and real engagement with repetitive buildings, Chang himself begins to resemble the factor he’s ostensibly learning. He turns into, in an actual sense, a sort of repetitive system himself as lived follow.
CENTS
Chang’s ultimate main venture takes his long-standing curiosity in items, requirements, and methods of record-keeping and extends it into what has develop into 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 data of those ten thousand particular person cash had been inscribed onto Bitcoin, permitting the work to proceed circulating and accumulating that means past Chang’s direct management or intervention. Then, in a improvement that offers the complete venture 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 attitude that historic distance supplies, the penny itself has begun to learn as a historic object, one thing that belongs to a selected second of foreign money and alternate that’s now passing into the previous.
The venture begins, like most of Chang’s work, from a situation that many individuals vaguely find out about however hardly ever assume by way of 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, below sure market circumstances, exceed their face worth when thought of purely as uncooked materials. The copper content material may be price multiple cent. This creates an odd scenario the place the State continues to outline every coin as being price precisely one cent (and makes melting them for his or her steel content material unlawful), whereas the fabric actuality of the thing suggests a special worth totally. Chang doesn’t deal with this as a paradox to resolve or an issue to resolve. He treats it as a given, as one of many structural circumstances that makes the work attainable and fascinating.
The method he developed is methodical and systematic. He eliminated ten thousand copper cents from circulation, pulling them out of the movement of alternate and use, and documented every one individually by way of detailed images (obverse and reverse, higher referred to 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 items disappear totally into undifferentiated mass. The penny’s strange function in alternate, its perform as a discrete unit of worth that may flow into and mix with different items, involves a definitive finish. However the block itself continues to exist in a number of kinds. It was rendered as an in depth 3D digital mannequin and inscribed as a single huge inscription filling the whole thing of Bitcoin block #839969. This digital model was then offered at Christie’s in 2024, coming into yet one more system of worth and circulation, transferring from materials object to digital file to collectible art work within the up to date artwork market.
The documentation, in the meantime, strikes in the other way from this consolidation. Whereas the bodily cash condense right into a single unified object and lose their existence as separable, countable items, every particular person cent stays readable as a definite file. The photographic pictures keep separate and individuated, every one assigned to a hard and fast and everlasting place within the set by way of inscription onto particular person satoshis. What disappears utterly on the stage of fabric type — you possibly can now not maintain these specific ten thousand pennies in your hand, can now not kind by way of them or organize them or put them again into circulation — stays completely intact on the stage of the file. 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 pressure a number of totally different and probably conflicting concepts about the place worth is positioned and the way it will get established and maintained. There’s worth as outlined by governmental authority: the State declares that this coin is price one cent, and that declaration carries authorized drive. There’s worth registered in materials composition: the copper content material may truly be price multiple cent when calculated based on commodity costs. And there’s worth produced by way of preservation and documentation: the choice to {photograph} every coin individually, to take care of 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 throughout the work, not collapsing right into a single unified that 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 follow, the underlying logic turns into clear. Objects that had been designed and manufactured for excellent interchange, for being functionally similar and mutually substitutable, develop into 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 way of cautious documentation and systematic archiving.
It’s price noting right here — as a result of it issues for understanding how the work continues to perform after Chang’s loss of life — that CENTS was initiated by way of collaboration with Sovrn Artwork, an unbiased, artist-first platform that offered the preliminary framework and help for the venture’s improvement. 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 targeted persistently on retaining the distinctions throughout the archive seen and legible — by way of shut studying of the documentation, by way of cautious cataloguing of variations and patterns, by way of writing that approaches the fabric from a number of angles and asks totally different sorts of questions. Their involvement has centered notably on the issue of the way to maintain this archive readable and significant over time, the way to keep the precision and care of the file because it continues to flow into by way of methods 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 monumental quantities of effort and time on initiatives constructed round intentionally slender constraints. The phrase isn’t inaccurate. And but it nonetheless manages to overlook one thing essential concerning the dimension of what Chang was truly doing along with his time and a focus. He handled mass tradition and industrial manufacturing with a sort of endurance that’s uncommon in up to date artwork. He made rarity and singularity seen inside exactly these issues we’ve realized to miss or dismiss as generic and interchangeable. He listened rigorously to what we’d name the noise inside acquainted symbols and objects — the small variations and amassed marks that circulation and dealing with inscribe on surfaces that had been designed particularly to withstand such marking and stay steady over time.
This consideration to what accumulates within the gaps and margins of methods designed for uniformity helps clarify why Lots of and 1000’s works so successfully as a title for this retrospective. On one stage, it merely names the dimensions at which Chang characteristically labored: gathering not dozens however a whole bunch, not a whole bunch however 1000’s of examples. However it additionally names one thing extra elementary. A self-discipline, a selected sort of methodical follow that requires wanting lengthy sufficient and punctiliously sufficient that distinction begins to look inside what first presents itself as sameness. The follow retains returning, with exceptional consistency throughout totally different initiatives and supplies, to what circulation leaves behind: the marks and traces that accumulate even on objects designed to stay steady and unchanged.
Chang’s work may be learn, in some ways, as a sustained follow of custody and care. He stored objects, pulled them out of circulation or gathered them from its margins. He listed and arranged them into methods 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 data inscribed on Bitcoin. By this course of, he constructed conditions and buildings by 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 location and the tactic by way of which particular person objects develop into readable as components of bigger methods and patterns.
The retrospective gathers Chang’s technique right into a single body and brings collectively initiatives from totally different moments in his profession to reveal 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 intently sufficient, and patiently sufficient, to truly see them.
It is a visitor submit by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are totally their very own and don’t essentially replicate these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
