Beijing's UCCA Hosts First Retrospective of Late Artist Rutherford Chang

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing opened Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands on January 17, 2026, marking the first institutional retrospective for the artist who died in 2025 at age 45^[1].

Chang built his practice around collecting mass-produced objects—vinyl records, newspaper portraits, coins, and video games—at scale to document how individual histories emerge from items designed for perfect uniformity^[1]. His best-known work, We Buy White Albums, consisted of a record store that exclusively purchased first pressings of the Beatles' 1968 album, never selling them^[1]. The project revealed how the album's deliberately blank white cover accumulated unique marks through decades of handling, transforming identical industrial products into singular objects bearing traces of their circulation^[1].

Other major works include The Class of 2008, cataloguing Wall Street Journal portrait illustrations from the financial crisis year, and CENTS, which documented ten thousand pre-1982 copper pennies before smelting them into a single block^[1]. The penny images were inscribed onto Bitcoin as permanent digital records in 2024^[1].

Co-curated by UCCA director Philip Tinari and artist Aki Sasamoto, both longtime friends of Chang, the retrospective demonstrates his consistent methodology across different materials and contexts^[1].