Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands

Rutherford Chang's first retrospective, Hundreds and Thousands, opened at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art and will run from January 17-April 12, 2026. It is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of the New York-based conceptual artist Rutherford Chang (1979-2025). The exhibition surveys the decades-long trajectory of Chang’s artistic practice, the exhibition features We Buy White Albums (2006–2025) and never before exhibited CENTS (2017–2024), his two most recognized projects, alongside other works that foreground his engagement with the act of collecting and his obsession with recontextualizing the everyday object. 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.

We Buy White Albums (2006-2025) at first glance resembles a record store, yet one where nothing is for sale. The installation is made entirely of copies of the Beatles’ 1968 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 by the album’s stamped serial numbers and presenting it for the first time in 2013 at the NY storefront art space Recess. Displayed for visitors to flip through and listen to the more than 3,500 albums bear annotations, stains, and other signs of everyday life that disrupt the once pristine surface with the markings of a collective social history. The work also includes a neon sign designating the active act of record buying that takes place during an exhibition, and x100, a sound component created when Chang digitally layered audio recordings from the first 100 copies he collected, pressing them onto a vinyl, where scratches, surface noise, and subtle temporal shifts from the collective albums gradually dissolve the music into dense sonic textures. 

Echoing We Buy White Albums in its use of mass-produced, ostensibly identical objects, CENTS (2017-2024) is composed of 10,000 American copper pennies minted before 1982, the year the coin’s copper alloy became predominately zinc-based. Chang photographed each coin to record its unique wear and patina, then transformed the collection into a 31-kilogram copper cube. Images of the coins and cube were also digitally inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, linking digital renderings of physical currency and raw material to virtual systems of value. Visitors can explore the collection on touchscreens or in the book CENTS, observing how decades of circulation have left subtle abrasions and discoloration. With pennies no longer in production—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 an economy in transition. 

Game Boy Tetris (2013-2018) is a performative project comprising 2,130 recordings of Tetris gameplay, alongside letters Chang wrote to Nintendo Power magazine. Chang filmed himself playing Tetris on a Nintendo Game Boy console—also presented in the exhibition—and uploaded the videos to gameboytetris.com, a website allowing audiences to search the games by score. He also live-streamed gameplay as performance on Twitch during a 2016 exhibition with Rhizome and the New Museum. While approached as meditative, menial labor requiring repetition and endurance, the project was also framed by a self-imposed system of measurement: a deliberately quixotic attempt to be the world-record Tetris score holder. In 2016,  Chang briefly ranked second in the world, just under Steve Wozniak, achieving a top score of 614,904 that remains the tenth highest recorded today.

With a characteristic rigor and subtle wit, Chang transforms everyday objects, media, and experiences into layered sites of reflection, allowing personal histories, cultural memory, mass produced objects, and widely circulated information to be observed, reconsidered, and reinterpreted. Additional works in the exhibition, including Class of 2008 (2008–2012), NBC Nightly News (2004), The Epic (2004–2005, made in collaboration with Emily Chua), and Portraits by Tone (2005), expand these themes, offering visitors insight into Chang’s creatively tender practice of discovering and highlighting the systems quietly shaping ordinary life. 

About the artist
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: Hundreds and Thousands (UCCA, Beijing, China, 2006); 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, including: 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).

Public programs
In conjunction with the exhibition, UCCA presents a series of public programs to open new perspectives for understanding and experiencing Rutherford Chang's artistic practice. On the exhibition’s opening day, exhibition curators, UCCA Director Philip Tinari and artist Aki Sasamoto, engaged in a conversation with Danielle Chang, who established the Estate of Rutherford Chang in 2025, to discuss the evolution of Chang’s artistic practices, expanded by dialogue with Ezra Green around the social systems of labor, collection as production, and value creation that ground CENTS, amongst other works.

Additional programs presented throughout the exhibition, including an academic conversation grounding Chang's practice in a history of time-based art, sound, and new media practices during the weekend of March 20 - 21, just ahead of Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as a workshop on archiving.

About UCCA
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is a leading institution of contemporary art that serves as a vital bridge connecting Chinese art with the global art scene. Guided by the mission of "bringing the best in art to a wider audience," UCCA operates a constellation of three distinct museums, each with unique architectural styles and exhibition programs, offering audiences a rich array of exhibitions, public programs, and educational activities. Since its founding in Beijing in 2007, UCCA has welcomed more than ten million visitors to over 200 exhibitions that systematically explore the key historical narratives of Chinese contemporary art in tandem with best-in-class exhibitions of leading international artists.