张能傑：成百上千
Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands on view January 17 – April 12, 2026, the artist’s first institutional and the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of the New York-based conceptual artist Rutherford Chang (1979-2025). Surveying the decades-long trajectory in Chang’s artistic practice, the exhibition features We Buy White Albums (2006–2025) and CENTS (2017–2024), two of his most recognized long-term projects, alongside other works that foreground his thoughtful, nostalgic engagement with the act of collecting and his obsession with the everyday object. Together, these pieces explore how he repositioned value to investigate the latent narratives embedded within circulation, exchange, and everyday objects. 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. The exhibition is co-curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari and artist Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980, Kanagawa). This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Estate of Rutherford Chang.

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.

Rutherford Chang
We Buy White Albums
2006-2025
3,555 vinyl records, paper record sleeves,
neon sign, cardboard boxes
Courtesy Estate of Rutherford Chang
张能傑
《我们收购白色专辑》
2006-2025
3555张黑胶唱片、纸质唱片封套、霓
虹灯、纸板箱
由张能傑艺术遗产提供

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.

Rutherford
CENTS Block Copper
2024
Cube made of 10,000 copper pennies
Courtesy Estate of Rutherford Chang
张能傑
《美分铜块》
2024
1万枚铜制美分制成的立方体
由张能傑艺术遗产提供

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.

Rutherford Chang
CENTS #1 – #10,000
2017-2024
Digital images inscribed on Bitcoin
Courtesy Estate of Rutherford Chang,
Private Collections
张能傑
《美分#1 – #10,000》
2017-2024
数字图像，刻写于比特币上
由张能傑艺术遗产提供，私人收藏

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.

Rutherford Chang
Game Boy Tetris
2013-2018
2,139 digital videos
Courtesy Estate of Rutherford Chang
张能傑
《Game Boy俄罗斯方块》
2013-2018
2139段数字影像
由张能傑艺术遗产提供

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.

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ABOUT RUTHERFORD CHANG

Rutherford Chang (1979-2025) was a New York–based conceptual artist. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Wesleyan University in 2002. Chang’s major solo exhibitions include: “We Buy White Albums” (Lawrence Arts Center, Lawrence, 2023; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, 2017; Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo, Tokyo, 2015; FACT, Liverpool, 2014); “Game Boy Tetris” (Galeria SKALA, Poznań, 2018; The Container, Tokyo, 2016). His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions internationally at institutions, such as: “Memory Palace in Ruins” (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei, 2023); “I am Here: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces” (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2022); “NOTHINGTOSEENESS- Void/White/Silence” (Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2021); “Black Album/White Cube” (Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 2020); “Hyper! A Journey into Art and Music” (Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2019); “Spin: Turning Records Into Art” (KMAC Museum, Louisville, 2018); “Real Live Online” (Rhizome & The New Museum, New York, 2016); “Coloring” (Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, 2014); “Do a Book” (White Space, Beijing, 2012); “Fast Futures: Asian Video Art” (Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2006); “Insomnia” (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2005); “SENI” (Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2004); “Butternut Ink” (Asian American Arts Center, New York, 2004); “AIM 23” (The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 2003); “Global Priority” (Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, New York, 2002).

ABOUT UCCA

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is China’s premier museum of modern and contemporary art. Committed to the belief that art can deepen lives and transcend boundaries, UCCA presents a wide range of exhibitions, public programs, and educational initiatives across four architecturally and programmatically distinct locations. Owned by a group of committed patrons, it is funded by donations, sponsorship, ticketing, and proceeds from the commercial activities of UCCA Lab. UCCA has presented more than 200 exhibitions and welcomed more than ten million visitors since its founding in Beijing in 2007 as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

ucca.org.cn/en

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