Rutherford Chang (American, 1979–2025) was a conceptual artist who spent decades collecting and cataloguing mass-produced objects — vinyl records, pennies, newspaper portraits — turning them into layered meditations on time, value and cultural memory.He amassed thousands of first-pressing copies of the Beatles' White Album in We Buy White Albums, and photographed 10,000 pre-1982 pennies before melting them into a copper cube for CENTS.,
Born in Houston to Taiwanese parents, Chang was raised in California.,He studied psychology at Wesleyan University, graduating in 2002, where he shared a house with the artist Aki Sasamoto.,After graduating he worked for two years as an assistant to the conceptual artist Xu Bing in Manhattan.Early works shown in London, Singapore and New York between 2003 and 2005 examined how printed and broadcast media circulate, including The Epic, made with Emily Chua by inking over a Singapore newspaper.,
At 15 he bought his first copy of the Beatles' White Album at a garage sale, and from 2006 he began systematically collecting numbered first pressings of the record.,He first exhibited the growing archive as We Buy White Albums in 2013 at Recess, a storefront space in SoHo set up to resemble a record store that buys rather than sells.,By the time of his death the collection held 3,417 copies, each retaining marks from previous owners — stains, doodles, notes — that gave the album's blank white cover a social history.,The installation was shown internationally at venues including FACT in Liverpool, Tokyo Wonder Site and Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt.,
Between 2013 and 2018 he recorded and live-streamed himself playing Tetris on a Game Boy for Game Boy Tetris, uploading more than 2,000 sessions, and climbed to second place in the world rankings behind Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.,,For CENTS (2017–2024) he photographed 10,000 American pennies minted before 1982, inscribed the images on the Bitcoin blockchain as Ordinals, and melted the coins into a 31-kilogram copper cube, CENTS Block 839969.,A three-dimensional digital model of the cube was auctioned by Christie's for USD 50,400.Chang's work was profiled in the 2025 trade edition of Robert Alice's On NFTs, and included in “BANKABLE”, Nina Roehrs's 2025 exhibition on art, finance and blockchain.,Chang died at his home in Manhattan on 24 January 2025, at age 45.A posthumous survey, “Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands”, opened at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing in January 2026, co-curated by UCCA director Philip Tinari and the artist Aki Sasamoto in collaboration with the Estate of Rutherford Chang.,
