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 follow. However additionally they miss what makes his method distinctive. Chang labored with objects that industrial tradition designed to be similar: data pressed in thousands and thousands of copies, portraits drawn in response to strict home model, 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 similar objects into singular issues.
The retrospective Rutherford Chang: A whole bunch and 1000’s opened January 17, 2026 at UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork in Beijing, one in every of 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’s also a posthumous one. Chang died in 2025 on the age of 45, abandoning a physique of labor constructed virtually fully across the follow of amassing 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 regularly 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 speedy cycles of development and substitute, by the fixed acceleration of change and circulation. In such an setting, Chang’s affected person consideration to what will get left behind, to the residues and traces that accumulate on objects at the same time as they transfer by means of techniques 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 follow, with course of and technique within the foreground.
To know Chang’s method, we have to look rigorously on the exhibition’s title. A whole bunch and 1000’s seems like easy measurement, like a gesture towards quantification. Chang usually labored at scale. He collected not dozens however tons of or hundreds of examples. However what the title actually describes is a technique and a specific means of working that emerges if 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 tons of 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 turn out to be seen. What you’re , in the end, is a document of lived life pressed into objects that industrial tradition designed to maintain steady and interchangeable.
We Purchase White Albums
One in every of Chang’s best-known tasks 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 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 industrial logic: It offered nothing, it solely purchased.
This premise is intentionally slim, and it stays slim all through the undertaking’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: individuals may 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 means of 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 know why this undertaking 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 thousands and thousands), whereas concurrently gesturing towards one thing like restricted version standing by means of the very act of numbering. Right here we discover the contradiction constructed straight 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 thousands and 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 shifting by means 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 injury spreads throughout the cardboard in irregular patterns. Corners get torn or bent by means of careless dealing with or too-tight shelving. Homeowners write their names on the duvet, add notes about when and the place they purchased the album, generally embrace dedications or detailed lists of favourite tracks. Value stickers from second-hand retailers accumulate in layers, creating unintended collages of business 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. 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 just for pristine, museum-quality copies, represents a alternative with vital penalties for the way the work means. It means treating injury 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 undertaking. A pristine copy would possibly inform you one thing about cautious preservation, about somebody who valued the thing sufficient to maintain it protected against the world. However a tattered copy, lined in stains and marks, tells a unique and doubtless richer story. In Chang’s fingers, these marks stay seen and start to matter in new methods. He returns repeatedly, throughout completely 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 document of circulation that makes them individually readable.
The work doesn’t cease with bodily assortment, nevertheless. Chang took the undertaking 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 outcome doesn’t register as a remix or a mashup in any typical sense. It feels nearer to the archive itself made audible, a means of listening to how uniformity fails if you stack sufficient iterations on prime of one another. What involves the floor will not be purity or constancy to an authentic, 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 identical primary methodological method to a really completely different type of mass-produced object: printed information media. The Class of 2008 presents itself as an easy catalogue. It’s an alphabetical itemizing of each hedcut portrait revealed in The Wall Avenue Journal in the course of 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 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 below 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 document. If somebody appeared a number of instances in 2008, that is clearly indicated within the e book, and people appearances are explicitly not decreased to a single consultant entry. This determination about how you can manage the fabric issues, as a result of it permits patterns of repetition and recurrence to emerge by means of the reader’s encounter with the work. And the timing of the undertaking sharpens its implications significantly. 2008 was, in fact as everyone knows, the 12 months when monetary authority got here below extraordinary pressure, when financial constructions 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 would possibly recommend. There’s no chronological story being advised about disaster and response, no hierarchy of significance imposed by means of the order of presentation. As a substitute, repetition itself does the interpretive work. As you web page by means of the e book, 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 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?
Sport Boy Tetris
If Chang’s amassing tasks make time seen by means of the gradual accumulation of marks on bodily objects, Sport Boy Tetris approaches the query of time and repetition by means of a unique 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 best doable rating within the authentic Sport 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 severely he took questions of record-keeping and documented proof of feat.
The identical easy rule-based system holds your consideration by means 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 at the same time as the explanations for persevering with turn out to be tougher to articulate. Progress stays measurable all through — you may observe enchancment throughout makes an attempt, watch abilities creating and patterns rising — even because the bigger that means or function 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 crucial distance, making work about amassing or repetition with out genuinely collaborating in these constructions himself. As a substitute, he constructed techniques and constraints that would take in years of his personal consideration and energy whereas nonetheless persevering with to demand extra. Over time, by means of this sustained and real engagement with repetitive constructions, Chang himself begins to resemble the factor he’s ostensibly learning. He turns into, in an actual sense, a type of repetitive system himself as lived follow.
CENTS
Chang’s closing main undertaking takes his long-standing curiosity in models, requirements, and techniques 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 data of those ten thousand particular person cash have been inscribed onto Bitcoin, permitting the work to proceed circulating and accumulating that means past Chang’s direct management or intervention. Then, in a growth that offers all the undertaking 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 supplies, the penny itself has begun to learn as a historic object, one thing that belongs to a specific second of foreign money and alternate that’s now passing into the previous.
The undertaking begins, like most of Chang’s work, from a situation that many individuals vaguely find out about however hardly ever suppose by means 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 cut back prices. Earlier than 1982, pennies have 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-about purely as uncooked materials. The copper content material is perhaps value multiple cent. This creates an odd state of affairs 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 thing suggests a unique 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 circumstances 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 alternate and use, and documented every one individually by means of detailed images (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 models disappear fully into undifferentiated mass. The penny’s odd function in alternate, its operate 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 kinds. It was rendered as an in depth 3D digital mannequin and inscribed as a single large inscription filling the whole thing of Bitcoin block #839969. This digital model was then offered at Christie’s in 2024, coming into one more system of worth and circulation, shifting from materials object to digital document to collectible paintings 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 models, every particular person cent stays readable as a definite document. The photographic pictures keep separate and individuated, every one assigned to a hard and fast and everlasting place within the set by means of inscription onto particular person satoshis. What disappears fully on the stage of fabric type — you may now not maintain these specific ten thousand pennies in your hand, can now not type by means of them or prepare them or put them again into circulation — stays completely intact on the stage of the document. You possibly can nonetheless take a look at the {photograph} of every particular coin, nonetheless study 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 doubtlessly 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 power. There’s worth registered in materials composition: the copper content material would possibly really be value multiple cent when calculated in response to commodity costs. And there’s worth produced by means of 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 completely different registers of worth stay distinct inside 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 have been designed and manufactured for good interchange, for being functionally similar 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 means of cautious documentation and systematic archiving.
It’s value noting right here — as a result of it issues for understanding how the work continues to operate after Chang’s dying — that CENTS was initiated by means of collaboration with Sovrn Artwork, an impartial, artist-first platform that offered the preliminary framework and assist for the undertaking’s growth. After the total 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 numerous types of experience and perspective to their engagement with the archive. Their work has targeted constantly on protecting the distinctions inside the archive seen and legible — by means of shut studying of the documentation, by means of cautious cataloguing of variations and patterns, by means 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 you can hold this archive readable and significant over time, how you can keep the precision and care of the document because it continues to flow into by means of techniques and contexts that Chang himself couldn’t have anticipated.
Archive as Observe
It’s simple 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 in regards to 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 persistence 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 would name the noise inside acquainted symbols and objects — the small variations and accrued marks that circulation and dealing with inscribe on surfaces that have been designed particularly to withstand such marking and stay steady over time.
This consideration to what accumulates within the gaps and margins of techniques designed for uniformity helps clarify why A whole bunch 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 tons of, not tons of however hundreds of examples. But it surely additionally names one thing extra elementary. A self-discipline, a specific type of methodical follow that requires trying lengthy sufficient and thoroughly sufficient that distinction begins to seem inside what first presents itself as sameness. The follow retains returning, with outstanding consistency throughout completely different tasks 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 saved objects, pulled them out of circulation or gathered them from its margins. He listed and arranged them into techniques 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. Via this course of, he constructed conditions and constructions wherein circulation itself turns into seen as a course of. Through which worth turns concrete and measurable. The archive is constantly the place this transformation takes place in his work — the positioning and the tactic by means of which particular person objects turn out to be readable as elements of bigger techniques and patterns.
The retrospective gathers Chang’s technique right into a single body and brings collectively tasks from completely different moments in his profession to show the underlying consistency of his method 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 prepared to look carefully sufficient, and patiently sufficient, to truly see them.
It is a visitor publish by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are fully their very own and don’t essentially mirror these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.