Rutherford Chang and the Quiet Drama of Accumulation

The renewed attention to Rutherford Chang’s work comes at a moment when questions of value, material presence, and endurance feel newly urgent. As economies tilt toward the digital and objects disappear into abstraction, Chang’s practice insists on the stubborn physicality of things that have been handled, worn down, and passed along. His art does not dramatize these shifts. It observes them patiently.

Presented at UCCA in Beijing, Hundreds and Thousands is the most extensive institutional presentation of Chang’s work to date. It traces a career built not on spectacle but on long-term commitment, often measured in years or even decades. Chang, who lived and worked in New York, developed projects that grew slowly through accumulation, allowing meaning to emerge through sustained attention rather than formal invention.

At the centre of the exhibition is We Buy White Albums, an archive of first-edition copies of The Beatles’ 1968 White Album. At first glance, the installation resembles a record shop, but none of the albums are for sale. Each bears the marks of prior ownership: handwriting, stains, damaged sleeves, and subtle discolorations that interrupt the album’s famously minimal design. What was once marketed as a pristine object becomes a social document, carrying traces of private lives and shared cultural memory.

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Chang began collecting these albums as a teenager and later turned the practice into an artwork structured by serial numbers and sound. By layering recordings from early pressings into a single composition, he allowed surface noise and wear to overtake the music itself. The result foregrounds the material limits of recording media and reframes listening as an encounter with time rather than nostalgia.

A similar logic shapes CENTS, a project built from 10,000 American pennies minted before 1982, when the coin still contained a high percentage of copper. Each penny was photographed, its individual wear carefully recorded, before the collection was compressed into a dense copper cube. The work moves between image, object, and data, linking physical currency to digital systems by inscribing the coin images onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

Seen today, as physical coins recede from everyday use, the work reads as a monument to a vanishing form of exchange. It resists easy commentary on finance or technology, instead offering a tactile counterpoint to abstract value systems. The cube’s weight and density insist on the persistence of matter, even as economies move elsewhere.

Time and endurance also structure Game Boy Tetris, a project that documents more than 2,000 recorded sessions of the artist playing the video game on handheld consoles. The recordings, consoles, and accompanying correspondence chart a durational performance defined by repetition and self-imposed limits. What begins as play becomes labor, measured through scores, hours, and physical strain.

Throughout the exhibition, Chang’s work aligns with a lineage of conceptual artists who used time as both medium and subject. Like On Kawara or Tehching Hsieh, he treated repetition not as redundancy but as a way to reveal systems that usually remain invisible. His materials were modest, often overlooked, yet his commitment was absolute.

The exhibition carries added resonance given Chang’s death in 2025. Without turning retrospective or elegiac, the works now register a heightened awareness of finitude. Their quiet insistence on duration, care, and accumulation feels less like an aesthetic choice than an ethical one.

Hundreds and Thousands ultimately frames Chang not as a collector of things, but as a careful reader of the world as it circulates. His work reminds us that cultural history is often written not through singular masterpieces, but through the slow, attentive tracing of objects as they move from hand to hand, gathering meaning along the way.

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