In a number of works titled Portraits by Tone, Rutherford Chang dissects triptychs of black-and-white photographs selected from a single issue of The New York Times, rearranging cut segments into tonal gradations before mounting them alongside their original captions. Here, images from the obituaries of three individuals—art historian Wai-kam Ho, entrepreneur Alfred J. Richard, and poet Peter Davison—dissolve into landscape-like spectrums. As in other versions of the piece applying this same abstraction to living figures, Chang exposes the malleability of media and underscores the fundamental commonalities between all people, blurring socially defined identities and constructed narratives through collage.

Epic consists of newspaper pages that have been meticulously covered in black marker, leaving only exposed human body parts visible. Though front-pages from The New York Times serve as the raw material for these versions, the pair generally worked with newspapers corresponding to exhibition locations, using The Straits Times for a public art project in a Singapore subway station in 2004 and The People’s Daily for their contribution to the 2008 exhibition “Delirious Beijing,” curated by Philip Tinari at PKM Gallery Beijing prior to his current role as UCCA Director. By removing the context provided by mass media, the work reduces “epic” events to the corporeal reality of the individual. Left unidentified, the figures that peek out from the void evoke a sense of shared humanity that transcends geopolitical boundaries.

Synonymous with The Wall Street Journal, hedcuts are hand-drawn penand-ink portraits that were introduced to the traditionally text-heavy, photography-averse newspaper in 1979. In The Class of 2008, Rutherford Chang takes this iconic portrait style and recontextualizes it through the format of a yearbook. A full book version of the work features every hedcut that appeared in The Wall Street Journal that year, arranged in alphabetical and then chronological order; here, it is presented through 180 excerpted pages. Prolific newsmakers appear repeatedly, forming an analogue index of real-time importance. Since the year it documents was one of great historical importance, the work serves as both a document of the 2008 financial crisis and a playful reminder of how media attention shapes visibility, hierarchy, and cultural memory.

At first glance, Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums resembles a record store. However, these records are not for sale, and every single one is a copy of British rock band The Beatles’ self-titled 1968 album, popularly known as The White Album. Designed by Pop artist Richard Hamilton and band member Paul McCartney, the album’s nearly blank front cover brought the minimalist approach of monochromatic artworks like Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting (1951) into mainstream culture.

Chang bought his first copy of the album for a dollar at a garage sale when he was fifteen. Around 2006, he began more seriously searching for first-edition pressings of the album, which are stamped with serial numbers. He publicly displayed his collection for the first time at the storefront space of New York arts organization Recess in 2013, soliciting additional copies through the neon sign also on display here, and setting for himself the impossible goal of collecting the entire edition of three million copies. Assembled for viewers to flip through, the albums—uniquely weathered, stained, and torn—reveal the myriad textures and tones that have accrued over time, subverting the idea of the blank cover. The absentminded doodles, proposals for alternate artwork, and heartfelt notes drawn and written on some covers present a social history of the decades since The White Album’s release, offering glimpses of listeners’ lives. Visitors may also listen to a sound piece Chang made by layering the audio from the first 100 copies of The White Album that he collected, then pressing the resulting recordings onto a vinyl double album. Scratches, surface noise, and subtle differences in speed gradually transform the recording into a mass of noise, emphasizing the avant-garde influences already present in the Beatles’ music.

Like We Buy White Albums, CENTS is an artwork created out of massproduced, ostensibly identical objects—in this case, 10,000 American pennies minted before 1982. Rutherford Chang began collecting pennies after learning of an online community of penny hoarders, who covet pre-1982 one-cent coins due to that fact that they are 95% copper. Rising demand for the metal means that each coin theoretically holds a material value of around three cents. To create CENTS and other associated works, Chang took high resolution photos of every penny in his collection, then uploaded these images to the Bitcoin blockchain as ordinals—NFTs attached to Satoshis, the cryptocurrency’s smallest denomination. Next, he melted the pennies into a 31 kg copper cube, which was also converted into a 3D model inscribed upon an entire Bitcoin as a larger ordinal.

By transforming the pennies multiple times, Chang meditates on questions of time and permanence, while also interrogating how recent technological advances have reshaped notions of value. The photographs of the original pennies, which visitors may view on a touchscreen or in a book, offer an unconventional visual record of time, showcasing how decades of use have left each coin uniquely abraded and discolored. Even as small change falls out of use and financial transactions move online, the sheer solidity of the copper block reminds us of how value may be physically manifested. Although pennies remain legal tender in the United States, the nation’s mint stopped producing them in November 2025, leaving this project as a multimedia monument to the coin that was.

From 2013 to 2018, Rutherford Chang regularly documented himself playing Tetris on a Nintendo Game Boy handheld console, uploading videos of his efforts to his website gameboytetris.com as well as presenting eight live streamed performances on Twitch. He attempted to reach the world record for the puzzle game, and came close: in 2016, he was ranked second on video game record website Twin Galaxies (his top score of 614,904 still places him in tenth today). While Chang enjoyed playing Tetris, finding it meditative, he drew links between his quixotic endeavor and contemporary work culture, in which “we’re expected to repeat a specific task over and over” and “strive to be number one in our fields.”

As befitting a game in which players race against the clock, Game Boy Tetris reflects on the inexorable passage of time. In 2014 and 2015, Chang drafted letters to Nintendo Power magazine—which had actually ceased publication several years earlier—sharing details about the project. In these letters, he notes that his scores placed him ahead of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, whose Tetris prowess Chang had read about in the magazine back in the early 1990s. Though steeped in childhood nostalgia and made using an obsolete console, Game Boy Tetris is also remarkably prescient: a decade ago video game live streams and competitive gaming were rapidly gaining popularity, yet—not entirely unlike record collecting—suggested obsessive dedication to a niche interest. Today, gamers are celebrities and live streams have become a key medium in popular culture.