When individuals describe Rutherford Chang’s work, you hear phrases like: obsessive, conceptual, minimalist. These descriptions aren’t mistaken, they level to one thing actual in his observe. However additionally they miss what makes his strategy distinctive. Chang labored with objects that industrial tradition designed to be equivalent: information pressed in tens of millions 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 remodel supposedly equivalent objects into singular issues.
The retrospective Rutherford Chang: Tons of and 1000’s opened January 17, 2026 at UCCA Heart for Up to date Artwork in Beijing, certainly one of China’s main establishments for modern artwork. This exhibition is important for a number of causes. It represents Chang’s first institutional retrospective and his most complete solo presentation thus far. It is usually a posthumous one. Chang died in 2025 on the age of 45, abandoning a physique of labor constructed virtually fully across the observe of amassing and arranging mass-produced objects till their particular person histories grew to become seen and legible.
Beijing offers a becoming location for this retrospective, although not for the plain causes alone. Sure, Chang moved regularly between New York and China all through his profession, and sure, he confirmed work in Beijing early on. However the metropolis itself gives one thing extra particular: a context formed by fast cycles of development and alternative, 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 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 observe, with course of and methodology within the foreground.
To know Chang’s strategy, we have to look rigorously on the exhibition’s title. Tons 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 hundreds of examples. However what the title actually describes is a technique and a specific method of working that emerges once you interact with mass-produced objects at adequate 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 practically 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 document of lived life pressed into objects that industrial tradition designed to maintain secure and interchangeable.
We Purchase White Albums
Considered one of Chang’s best-known initiatives 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 document retailer that stocked solely first pressings of the Beatles’ The Beatles (1968), generally generally known 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 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: individuals 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 grew to become a second of direct trade 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 collected proof of circulation, carried the work ahead.
To know 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 duvet as an virtually 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 operate: 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 item 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. House owners write their names on the duvet, add notes about when and the place they purchased the album, typically embody dedications or detailed lists of favourite tracks. Worth stickers from second-hand outlets accumulate in layers, creating unintended collages of economic historical past. In some circumstances, mildew units in throughout storage in damp basements or attics, creating natural patterns that may look virtually intentional, or let’s imagine, virtually 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 out just for pristine, museum-quality copies, represents a selection with vital penalties for the 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 item sufficient to maintain it protected against the world. However a tattered copy, coated in stains and marks, tells a special and doubtless richer story. In Chang’s fingers, these marks stay seen and start to matter in new methods. He returns time and again, throughout completely different initiatives, 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 document 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 collected put on compound right into a shifting refrain of sound. The end result doesn’t register as a remix or a mashup in any typical sense. It feels nearer to the archive itself made audible, a method of listening to how uniformity fails once you stack sufficient iterations on high of one another. What involves the floor just isn’t purity or constancy to an unique, however time itself, materialized within the type of friction and noise. The piece capabilities as what we would 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 primary methodological strategy to a really completely different form 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 in the course of the yr 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 approach 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 beneath scrutiny and stand the check of time.
The construction of {the catalogue} is deceptively easy: alphabetical order, with repetition saved seen within the document. If somebody appeared a number of instances in 2008, that is clearly indicated within the ebook, and people appearances are explicitly not decreased to a single consultant entry. This choice about how one can 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 yr when monetary authority got here beneath extraordinary pressure, when financial constructions 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 specific critique. The alphabetical group flattens any narrative arc that the yr’s occasions may recommend. 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 ebook, 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 price this specific form of consideration, who will get enrolled on this visible vocabulary of permanence and authority, and who stays invisible to this institutional gaze?
Sport Boy Tetris
If Chang’s amassing initiatives make time seen by way of the gradual accumulation of marks on bodily objects, Sport Boy Tetris approaches the query of time and repetition by way of 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 realize the very best doable rating within the unique Sport 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 way of lengthy stretches of focus punctuated by failure and the choice to restart. The need 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 possibly can monitor enchancment throughout makes an attempt, watch abilities creating and patterns rising — even because the bigger which 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 troublesome to reply with any conviction.
Chang wasn’t observing obsessive cultures or completionist practices from a secure vital distance, making work about amassing or repetition with out genuinely taking part in these constructions himself. As an alternative, he constructed programs and constraints that would take up 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 constructions, Chang himself begins to resemble the factor he’s ostensibly finding out. He turns into, in an actual sense, a form of repetitive system himself as lived observe.
CENTS
Chang’s ultimate main venture takes his long-standing curiosity in items, 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 america. In 2024 the digital information of those ten thousand particular person cash have 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 provides your 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 angle that historic distance offers, the penny itself has begun to learn as a historic object, one thing that belongs to a specific second of foreign money and trade 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 yr when the U.S. Mint modified the composition of the penny to scale back prices. Earlier than 1982, pennies have been made primarily of copper; after that date, they grew to become copper-plated zinc. This seemingly minor element has actual penalties: pennies from the ancient times can, beneath sure market situations, exceed their face worth when thought-about purely as uncooked materials. The copper content material could 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 metallic content material unlawful), whereas the fabric actuality of the item suggests a special worth fully. 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 situations that makes the work doable and attention-grabbing.
The method he developed is methodical and systematic. He eliminated ten thousand copper cents from circulation, pulling them out of the circulation of trade and use, and documented every one individually by way of detailed pictures (obverse and reverse, higher generally known as heads and tails). The cash have been then smelted collectively right into a single copper block weighing sixty-eight kilos. At this second, particular person items disappear fully into undifferentiated mass. The penny’s strange function in trade, its operate 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 varieties. It was rendered as an in depth 3D digital mannequin and inscribed as a single large inscription filling everything of Bitcoin block #839969. This digital model was then offered at Christie’s in 2024, getting into yet one more system of worth and circulation, transferring from materials object to digital document to collectible art work within the modern 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 items, every particular person cent stays readable as a definite document. The photographic photos 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 fully on the stage of fabric type — you possibly can not maintain these specific ten thousand pennies in your hand, can not kind by way of them or prepare them or put them again into circulation — stays completely intact on the stage of the document. 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 stress a number of completely 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 price one cent, and that declaration carries authorized power. There’s worth registered in materials composition: the copper content material may really be price multiple cent when calculated in line with 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 completely 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 observe, the underlying logic turns into clear. Objects that have 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 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 operate after Chang’s loss of life — that CENTS was initiated by way of collaboration with Sovrn Artwork, an impartial, artist-first platform that supplied the preliminary framework and assist for the venture’s growth. After the complete inscription of the work onto Bitcoin was accomplished, a council fashioned 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 accountability for the work’s continuation and interpretation. The council members come from completely different generations and completely different skilled fields, bringing varied types of experience and perspective to their engagement with the archive. Their work has centered constantly on preserving the distinctions inside 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 completely different sorts of questions. Their involvement has centered significantly on the issue of how one can preserve this archive readable and significant over time, how one can keep the precision and care of the document because it continues to flow into by way of programs and contexts that Chang himself couldn’t have anticipated.
Archive as Apply
It’s simple 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 really doing along with his time and a focus. He handled mass tradition and industrial manufacturing with a form of persistence that’s uncommon in modern artwork. He made rarity and singularity seen inside exactly these issues we’ve discovered to miss or dismiss as generic and interchangeable. He listened rigorously to what we would name the noise inside acquainted symbols and objects — the small variations and collected marks that circulation and dealing with inscribe on surfaces that have 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 Tons of and 1000’s works so successfully as a title for this retrospective. On one stage, it merely names the size at which Chang characteristically labored: amassing not dozens however a whole bunch, not a whole bunch however hundreds of examples. However it additionally names one thing extra elementary. A self-discipline, a specific form of methodical observe that requires wanting lengthy sufficient and punctiliously sufficient that distinction begins to seem inside what first presents itself as sameness. The observe retains returning, with outstanding consistency throughout completely different initiatives 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 will be learn, in some ways, as a sustained observe 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. By this course of, he constructed conditions and constructions wherein circulation itself turns into seen as a course of. By which worth turns concrete and measurable. The archive is constantly the place this transformation takes place in his work — the positioning and the strategy by way of which particular person objects turn out to be readable as components of bigger programs and patterns.
The retrospective gathers Chang’s methodology right into a single body and brings collectively initiatives from completely different moments in his profession to display the underlying consistency of his strategy throughout varied 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 prepared to look intently sufficient, and patiently sufficient, to really see them.
It is a visitor put up by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are fully their very own and don’t essentially mirror these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
