Steadily described as a post-conceptualist, the US artist Rutherford Chang (1979-2025) created works from on a regular basis objects, typically amassed in giant portions over prolonged intervals. His best-known initiatives embody CENTS (2017-25), a stable block of 10,000 melted pennies, and We Purchase White Albums (2013-25), an ever-evolving set up composed of a whole bunch of vinyl copies of The Beatles’ self-titled ninth studio album, generally generally known as The White Album due to its largely clean cowl. Chang obsessively collected and displayed first pressings of the document, coveting the best way most of the sleeves—designed by the British conceptual artist Richard Hamilton—had been written or drawn on by their homeowners.
Every of those works emerged from a meticulous, nearly compulsive, amassing observe that explored the mutable qualities of time and circulation, uncovering surprising narratives by inserting once-identical objects into new patterns and contexts. Each items will function alongside 4 additional works within the exhibition Rutherford Chang: Lots of and Hundreds, which opens this month at UCCA Beijing—a 12 months after the artist’s demise on the age of 45. Chang, whose mother and father have been from Taiwan, spent important time in China, notably across the 2008 Olympics when a number of different worldwide artists and curators have been additionally working and exhibiting within the nation.
Unbelievable eye
“He had an unimaginable eye for programs and the way they’re constructed, which regularly led him to construct programs of his personal—whether or not amassing White Albums or pennies, rearranging newspapers, or rising to the highest of the Sport Boy Tetris rankings,” says the UCCA director Philip Tinari, who was a part of the identical prolonged circle of worldwide artists, writers, and creatives dwelling in China on the time Chang was there. Tinari tells The Artwork Newspaper that he adopted Chang’s profession for a few years, first studying about his work via the artist Xu Bing, whom Chang assisted after finding out psychology at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, whereas additionally taking artwork programs. Tinari included Chang’s work in Delirious Beijing, a landmark 2008 exhibition on the metropolis’s PKM Gallery.
“It’s the durational and relational facets of We Purchase White Albums that set up it as a conceptual paintings,” Tinari says. “This was an ongoing obsession based mostly on the unimaginable premise of amassing all three million copies of the album’s first urgent. Every time he exhibited it, he created an area the place viewers may work together—with him, with one another, and with the objects—in a means that stood at a refined take away from the on a regular basis actuality it mimicked. There’s a tender absurdity, underpinned by a near-frightening rigour, that elevates it past the realm of the atypical.”
• Rutherford Chang: Lots of and Hundreds, UCCA Beijing, 17 January-12 April
