After His Untimely Death, Rutherford Chang’s Survey Rewrites What a Square Can Do

Rutherford Chang, who died last year at age 45, is the subject of a posthumous survey at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing titled "Hundreds and Thousands." The exhibition centers on Chang's socially engaged works that explore value, circulation, and systems through the deceptively simple form of the square. His best-known piece, "We Buy White Albums" (2013–25), involved amassing roughly one percent of the first pressing of the Beatles' "White Album," highlighting how objects accrue personal and economic worth through use and history. Other works include melting 10,000 copper pennies into a cube and assembling Wall Street Journal portraits from 2008 into a grid that captures a year of crisis and change.

Stories in Copper and Vinyl

Geschichten in Kupfer und Vinyl

The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is hosting "Hundreds and Thousands," the first institutional retrospective of the late American conceptual artist Rutherford Chang. The exhibition showcases Chang’s career-long obsession with collecting and cataloging mass-produced objects, most notably featuring his collection of over 3,700 first-pressings of the Beatles’ "White Album." Other significant works include a 31-kilogram copper cube created from 10,000 pre-1982 pennies and a digital archive of over 2,000 of the artist's own Game Boy Tetris sessions.

From 10,000 pennies to a Beatles record haul, the obsessive work of Rutherford Chang heads to Beijing

Rutherford Chang (1979-2025), a US post-conceptualist artist known for obsessive collections of everyday objects, is the subject of a posthumous exhibition at UCCA Beijing. The show, titled "Hundreds and Thousands," features his best-known works, including "CENTS" (2017-25)—a solid block of 10,000 melted pennies—and "We Buy White Albums" (2013-25), an installation of hundreds of vinyl copies of The Beatles' White Album, whose sleeves were often marked by previous owners. Both works, along with four others, explore how identical objects accumulate unique narratives through time and circulation.

the beatles white album art installation lands in liverpool 79072

New York artist Rutherford Chang has brought his installation of over 1,000 copies of The Beatles' 'White Album' to FACT in Liverpool, the band's hometown. The piece, which took eight years to assemble, features copies of the album with handwritten notes, drawings, and other traces left by previous owners, and is on view for the first time in the UK. The exhibition, titled 'We Buy White Albums,' also invites the public to sell their copies to the artist.