RUTHERFORD CHANG

One of the exhibition’s central works, We Buy White Albums (2006-2025), unfolds as an archive that at first glance resembles a record store, yet one in which nothing is for sale. The installation comprises exclusively copies of The Beatles’ self-titled 1968 album, commonly known as The White Album, whose nearly blank cover, designed by Richard Hamilton in collaboration with Paul McCartney, introduced a minimalist aesthetic into popular culture. Chang bought his first copy of the album at age fifteen and, from 2006 onward, systematically sought out first-edition pressings, organizing the archive via its stamped serial number, and later presenting the growing archive for the first time in 2013 at the storefront space of New York arts organization Recess. Displayed for visitors to flip through and listen, these albums, bearing annotations, and stains and other signs of wear, “disrupt” the once-pristine monochrome surface with a social history through doodles, notes, and traces of everyday life. The work also includes a sound component composed by layering recordings from the first 100 copies Chang collected and pressing the result onto vinyl, where scratches, surface noise, and subtle temporal shifts gradually dissolve the music into dense sonic textures, foregrounding both the materiality of the medium and the experimental currents embedded within the original album.

Echoing We Buy White Albums in its use of mass-produced, ostensibly identical objects, CENTS (2017-2024) is made of 10,000 American pennies minted before 1982, valued for their copper content. Chang photographed each coin to record its unique wear and patina, then transformed the collection into a 31-kilogram copper cube. The images of the original coins were also digitally inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, linking digital renderings of physical currency to virtual systems of value, a conceptual gesture that reflects on time, permanence, and the evolving methods of assigning material value. Visitors can explore the collection on touchscreens or in a book, observing how decades of circulation have left subtle abrasions and discoloration. As physical pennies fall out of use—the U.S. Mint permanently suspended their production in November 2025—the dense copper block asserts a tangible sense of value, offering a multimedia monument to the coin and an economy in transition.

Another significant work in the exhibition, Game Boy Tetris (2013-2018) is a performative project comprising more than 2,000 recordings of Tetris gameplay, exhibited alongside letters Chang wrote to Nintendo Power magazine and the handheld consoles he used. Created between 2013 and 2018, the work traces the artist’s durational investigation of labor through repetition, endurance, and self-imposed systems of measurement. Chang filmed himself playing Tetris on Nintendo Game Boy consoles, which are also presented in the installation, uploading the videos to his website gameboytetris.com (to allow audiences to search the games by score), and further presented eight live-streamed performances on Twitch. While approached as a meditative practice, the project was also framed by a deliberately quixotic attempt to approach the world record for Tetris. In 2016, he briefly ranked second on the video game record website Twin Galaxies, achieving a top score of 614,904 that remains the tenth highest recorded today.

“Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands” surveys the artist’s career of meticulously exploring narratives with repetition and accumulation. With a characteristic rigor and subtle wit, Chang transforms everyday objects, media, and experiences into layered sites of reflection, allowing personal histories, cultural memory, and mass-produced objects to be observed, reconsidered, and reinterpreted. Alongside We Buy White Albums, CENTS, and Game Boy Tetris, the exhibition presents additional works–Class of 2008 (2008 – 2012), NBC Nightly News (2004), The Epic (2004 – 2005), and Portraits by Tone (2005)–that further expand these themes, offering visitors insight into Chang’s creatively tender practice of discovering and highlighting the systems quietly shaping ordinary elements in life. His approach resonates with a lineage of conceptual artists such as On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh, whose durational works foreground time, labor, and the resolute presence of the artist as both medium and measure. Seen in this light, Chang’s meticulous accumulations and long-term commitments attest to the resilience of art-making itself. That his life was cut short lends these works an added poignancy, sharpening their reflections on time, fragility, and the lasting imprint of sustained artistic devotion.