Rutherford Chang Retrospective: Hundreds and Thousands at UCCA Beijing

The posthumous retrospective, "Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands," at UCCA Beijing showcases the artist's career dedicated to collecting and arranging mass-produced objects to expose the unique marks left by time and handling, revealing singularity within industrial uniformity. Key projects include "We Buy White Albums," which archives used copies of The Beatles' White Album to study wear patterns, and "The Class of 2008," which catalogues every hedcut portrait from The Wall Street Journal in 2008 to examine institutional representation during financial crisis. Another significant work, "CENTS," involved documenting 10,000 pre-1982 copper pennies, smelting them into a block, and then inscribing the individual documentation onto the Bitcoin blockchain, exploring conflicting values of state decree, material composition, and documentation. Chang's practice, characterized by obsessive, systematic archiving, consistently aimed to make difference visible within sameness, treating damage and circulation marks as crucial information rather than degradation.

(Source：Bitcoin Magazine)