Rutherford Chang, a conceptual artist who turned his assortment of the Beatles’ “White Album” right into a meditation on the getting older of a vinyl traditional — and who, in one other challenge, melted down 10,000 pennies right into a copper block to make an announcement concerning the worth of every pink cent — died on Jan. 24 at his residence in Manhattan. He was 45.
His sister Danielle Chang mentioned {that a} particular trigger wouldn’t be decided for a number of months.
Mr. Chang’s initiatives had been the fruit of a playful, obsessive thoughts. In “Andy Eternally” he and a colleague edited all the Hong Kong film star Andy Lau’s loss of life scenes, in chronological order of the movies’ launch, right into a 27-minute video.
In one other video, “Lifeless Air,” he eliminated all of the phrases from President George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech (together with these by which he mentioned the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein had ambitions to construct nuclear and organic weapons), leaving solely his pauses, his breaths and the applause from the Home chamber.
And he minimize and pasted a 2004 entrance web page of The New York Instances, rearranging all of the textual content into alphabetical order. A few of it, when learn aloud, appears like Yoda, the “Star Wars” character who spoke in an idiosyncratic fashion. One headline learn, “a Abuse Aide And Conflict Normal on Rumsfeld.”
“He was obsessive, however not compulsive,” Ms. Chang, his sister, mentioned. “He was a collector. His residence is so orderly, with nothing misplaced, however he threw nothing away.”
Mr. Chang was not initially a collector of the 1968 double LP “The Beatles,” higher referred to as “The White Album.” He purchased one copy of it as a youngster, however when he received a second one some years later, he realized that the 2 — with their plain white covers as clean canvases — had modified over time.
“The extra I received, the extra I might see how totally different these as soon as similar objects had turn out to be,” he advised the web site The Inventive Unbiased in 2017. “I didn’t know the place it was going after I began aside from that I needed a minimum of sufficient to see the variations between them. Then it simply stored going and I can’t cease.”
Mr. Chang’s set up, “We Purchase White Albums,” unveiled on the Recess gallery in Manhattan in 2013, took the type of a facsimile of a file store, with albums in bins and turntables to play the music.
One wall was stuffed with albums whose homeowners had put their names on the covers, in addition to written letters, poems and different ephemera on them. Some had drawn footage. The covers additionally confirmed put on patterns created by rotting cardboard.
“Every album has aged uniquely and turn out to be an artifact of the final half-century,” Mr. Chang advised the web site Hyperallergic in 2013.
The exhibition — which traveled to a number of cities, together with Liverpool, the house of the Beatles, in 2014 — additionally had an audio part.
When he listened to copies of “The White Album” on the gallery, Mr. Chang used knowledgeable recording system linked to the turntables to make a digital recording; he later had a studio electronically layer 100 of them right into a urgent of 1,000 vinyl information, with all of the static, scratches and skips of the unique recordings. He bought some copies for $20 every and traded others for extra “White Albums” (his assortment reached 3,417 copies). He additionally posted among the audio on his web site.
His vinyl file supplied a novel spin on “The White Album.” Variations within the manufacturing facility pressings and fluctuations within the pace of Mr. Chang’s turntable prompted oddities, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Instances in 2013: “Firstly of ‘Pricey Prudence,’ you hear the primary line echoing a number of occasions, and by ‘Whereas My Guitar Gently Weeps’ the observe is a virtually unrecognizable roar.”
Rutherford Chang was born on Dec. 27, 1979, in Houston to folks from Taiwan and grew up in Los Altos Hills, Calif., close to Palo Alto. His father, Jason, is a founding father of ASE Expertise Holding, a semiconductor firm, and his mom, Ching Ping (Hsiang) Chang, is a retired inside designer.
Rutherford’s earliest assortment, when he was a toddler, was of the small stickers that include fruit, which he used to embellish a binder. All through his life, he would accumulate many different issues: baseball bats, resort stationery, postcards, outdated Chinese language megaphones, years’ price of receipts.
“He had a novel manner of wanting on the world,” Ms. Chang mentioned. “He noticed magnificence in on a regular basis objects.”
After majoring in psychology whereas taking artwork programs at Wesleyan College, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in 2002, he was an assistant to the artist Xu Bing in Manhattan for 2 years. He then labored on his personal initiatives in Singapore and Beijing.
In 2008, Mr. Chang clipped about 4,000 ink-dot portraits from The Wall Avenue Journal, then reassembled them in alphabetical order right into a yearbook-like publication he known as “The Class of 2008.” He repeated a number of portraits; Barack Obama, who was elected president of the USA that 12 months, seems 94 occasions, and John McCain, his Republican opponent, seems 74 occasions.
When it was exhibited on the White House Gallery in Beijing in 2012, The Journal known as Mr. Chang’s challenge an “illuminating window into the priorities and thought processes of The Journal because it sought to doc the 12 months’s occasions.”
Mr. Chang turned his fascination with video video games into efficiency artwork. In 2016, he livestreamed on the platform Twitch his try to attain the world’s highest rating in Recreation Boy Tetris, the Nineties puzzle sport.
By then, he had been taking part in Tetris since childhood — his purpose was to beat the rating of Steve Wozniak, a founding father of Apple — and recorded greater than 1,700 movies of his sport taking part in. The movies had been exhibited on the Container, a gallery in Tokyo, additionally in 2016.
Mr. Chang advised The Guardian that 12 months that taking part in Tetris serially mimicked the drudgery of the fashionable workplace, the place “we’re anticipated to repeat a particular job time and again.” He added, “It’s the best way capitalism makes us work, the place you need to obtain greater than others.”
His excessive rating of 614,094 earned him second place in world rankings for some time.
Mr. Chang’s final main challenge, “Cents,” examined the character of worth and was anchored in each the analog and digital worlds. Round 2017, he started to casually put aside pennies from the change he obtained, he advised The Inventive Unbiased, with no explicit purpose.
He knew, he mentioned, that some hoarders had been exchanging money for rolls of pennies at banks after which checking out the extra helpful ones from those made earlier than 1982, once they had been 95 % copper and 5 % zinc, making each price as much as 3.1 cents. However, he mentioned, a hoarder couldn’t obtain a lot worth with out giant portions of the older copper.
“I’ve been fascinated by what I might do with melting them down,” he mentioned, “regardless that it’s unlawful” as a result of pennies are forex. “The penny is that this factor that all of us have in our pockets. It’s the bottom frequent denominator, it’s like junk, it’s like nothing.”
He in the end discovered what he would do. He collected 10,000 pennies from 1982 and earlier; documented and inscribed them on the blockchain, a digital database, and melted them down right into a 68-pound dice.
A 3-dimensional mannequin of the dice was auctioned by Christie’s final 12 months as a bitcoin ordinal, a digital asset, for $50,400 — Mr. Chang retained the bodily dice — whereas the digital inscriptions on the pennies are owned by 1000’s of people and are bought on the open market.
Along with his sister Danielle and his mother and father, Mr. Chang is survived by one other sister, Madeline Chang, and his associate, Tsubasa Narita.
Aki Sasamoto, an artist and a professor on the Yale College of Artwork, had watched Mr. Chang construct his physique of labor since they had been housemates at Wesleyan. She mentioned that he had introduced character to conceptual artwork, a area typically devoid of 1, and that he was a pointy observer of cultural phenomena and new media.
Whereas his work may look obsessive, Ms. Sasamoto mentioned, “I discover it’s extra like a thoroughness, according to private ritual and devotion. I relate it to somebody who meditates each day. There was one thing religious about him.”
