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.
This survey matters because it reframes the art-historical conversation about the square—from Malevich and Reinhardt to Albers—by insisting that the form can be social rather than purely abstract. Chang's work interrogates how global systems like finance, supply chains, and personal interaction assign value to everyday objects, making his practice deeply relevant to contemporary debates about materiality, digital economies, and the intersection of art and commerce. His untimely death at 45 adds urgency to this retrospective, which positions him as a significant conceptual artist of the 21st century.