Frequently described as a post-conceptualist, the US artist Rutherford Chang (1979-2025) created works from everyday objects, often amassed in large quantities over extended periods. His best-known projects include CENTS (2017-25), a solid block of 10,000 melted pennies, and We Buy White Albums (2013-25), an ever-evolving installation composed of hundreds of vinyl copies of The Beatles’ self-titled ninth studio album, commonly known as The White Album because of its largely blank cover. Chang obsessively collected and displayed first pressings of the record, coveting the way many of the sleeves—designed by the British conceptual artist Richard Hamilton—had been written or drawn on by their owners.
Each of these works emerged from a meticulous, almost compulsive, collecting practice that explored the mutable qualities of time and circulation, uncovering unexpected narratives by placing once-identical objects into new patterns and contexts. Both pieces will feature alongside four further works in the exhibition Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands, which opens this month at UCCA Beijing—a year after the artist’s death at the age of 45. Chang, whose parents were from Taiwan, spent significant time in China, particularly around the 2008 Olympics when several other international artists and curators were also working and exhibiting in the country.
Incredible eye
“He had an incredible eye for systems and how they are constructed, which often led him to build systems of his own—whether collecting White Albums or pennies, rearranging newspapers, or rising to the top of the Game Boy Tetris rankings,” says the UCCA director Philip Tinari, who was part of the same extended circle of international artists, writers, and creatives living in China at the time Chang was there. Tinari tells The Art Newspaper that he followed Chang’s career for many years, first learning about his work through the artist Xu Bing, whom Chang assisted after studying psychology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, while also taking art courses. Tinari included Chang’s work in Delirious Beijing, a landmark 2008 exhibition at the city’s PKM Gallery.
“It’s the durational and relational aspects of We Buy White Albums that establish it as a conceptual artwork,” Tinari says. “This was an ongoing obsession based on the impossible premise of collecting all three million copies of the album’s first pressing. Each time he exhibited it, he created a space where viewers could interact—with him, with each other, and with the objects—in a way that stood at a subtle remove from the everyday reality it mimicked. There is a tender absurdity, underpinned by a near-frightening rigour, that elevates it beyond the realm of the ordinary.”
• Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands, UCCA Beijing, 17 January-12 April