RUTHERFORD CHANG

Early life and education of Rutherford Chang

Rutherford Chang was born on 27 December 1979 in Houston, Texas, to Taiwanese parents. He grew up in California before moving to the east coast to attend Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he majored in psychology and received his BA in 2002.

At Wesleyan, Chang was housemates with the Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto, who later recalled that he was ‘already an artist’ as a student, wearing clothing he made from everyday objects and labelling everything around him with embossing tape. After graduating, he worked as an artist assistant for the Chinese-American conceptual artist Xu Bing in Manhattan for two years, an experience that deepened his engagement with systematic and archival modes of art-making.

Rutherford Chang Artworks and Style

Rutherford Chang’s practice was rooted in collecting, cataloguing, and recontextualising everyday objects through meticulous, durational processes that revealed hidden narratives within mass-produced things.

Early works and developments, 2000s

Chang’s earliest exhibited works emerged in the early 2000s, including group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (Insomnia, 2005), Singapore Art Museum (SENI, 2004), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (AIM 23, 2003). The Epic (2004–2005), comprising permanent marker drawings on newspaper, and NBC Nightly News (2004), a digital video work, established his interest in media circulation and the transformation of printed matter. In 2008, he collected around 4,000 ink-dot portraits from The Wall Street Journal and reorganised them alphabetically into a yearbook-style publication titled The Class of 2008, later exhibited at White Space Gallery in Beijing in 2012.

We Buy White Albums and mature practice, 2006–2025

Chang purchased his first copy of the Beatles’ White Album at a garage sale aged 15, and from 2006 began systematically acquiring numbered first pressings of the 1968 double LP. The collection — which grew to 3,417 copies by the time of his death — was first presented as an installation in 2013 at Recess, a storefront art space in SoHo, New York, set up to resemble a record store that buys rather than sells. Each album’s once-pristine white sleeve, designed by the British conceptual artist Richard Hamilton, had acquired its own unique history — mould, coffee stains, doodles, poems — making the originally identical objects into singular artefacts. The work also included a sound component: Chang layered recordings from the first 100 copies he collected and pressed the result onto vinyl, where scratches and surface noise gradually dissolved the music into dense sonic texture. We Buy White Albums was subsequently exhibited at FACT, Liverpool (2014), Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo, Tokyo (2015), Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2017), SPACES, Cleveland, and Lawrence Arts Center, Kansas (2023).

‘CENTS’, Game Boy Tetris, and final projects, 2013–2025

In parallel, Chang pursued two other major long-term projects. Game Boy Tetris (2013–2018) comprised more than 2,000 recordings of himself playing Tetris on a Nintendo Game Boy, uploaded to gameboytetris.com and presented in eight live-streamed performances on Twitch. In 2016, he briefly ranked second on the video game record website Twin Galaxies, achieving a top score of 614,904 — still the tenth highest recorded. The work was exhibited at Galeria SKALA, Poznań (2018) and The Container, Tokyo (2016).

CENTS (2017–2024) saw Chang collect 10,000 American copper pennies minted before 1982, photograph each one to record its unique wear and patina, inscribe the images on the Bitcoin blockchain, and then melt the coins into a 31-kilogram copper cube. A three-dimensional digital model of the work was auctioned by Christie’s as a digital asset for USD 50,400.

Chang died on 24 January 2025 at his home in Manhattan, aged 45.

Awards and honours of Rutherford Chang

• 2016 – Second-place ranking, Twin Galaxies world record for Game Boy Tetris
• 2003 – AIM 23 fellowship, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York

Exhibitions of Rutherford Chang

Rutherford Chang exhibited at institutions and galleries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Select solo exhibitions

• 2026 – Hundreds and Thousands, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (17 January–12 April 2026)
• 2023 – We Buy White Albums, Lawrence Arts Center, Lawrence, Kansas
• 2018 – Game Boy Tetris, Galeria SKALA, Poznań
• 2017 – We Buy White Albums, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento
• 2016 – Game Boy Tetris, The Container, Tokyo
• 2015 – We Buy White Albums, Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo, Tokyo
• 2014 – We Buy White Albums, FACT, Liverpool
• 2013 – We Buy White Albums, Recess, New York

Select group exhibitions

• 2023 – Memory Palace in Ruins, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei
• 2022 – I am Here: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
• 2021 – NOTHINGTOSEENESS – Void/White/Silence, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
• 2020 – Black Album/White Cube, Kunsthal Rotterdam
• 2019 – Hyper! A Journey into Art and Music, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
• 2016 – Real Live Online, Rhizome & The New Museum, New York
• 2005 – Insomnia, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
• 2004 – SENI, Singapore Art Museum

Website, Instagram, and further reading

Rutherford Chang’s estate is managed by Danielle Chang. His website is rutherfordchang.com and his Instagram for the White Albums project is @webuywhitealbums. View exhibitions featuring Rutherford Chang on Ocula, including the current UCCA Beijing solo in Ocula‘s Top 10 Exhibitions for February 2026.

Rutherford Chang FAQs

Ocula | 2026