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 crimson cent — died on Jan. 24 at his house in Manhattan. He was 45.
His sister Danielle Chang stated {that a} particular trigger wouldn’t be decided for a number of months.
Mr. Chang’s initiatives have been the fruit of a playful, obsessive thoughts. In “Andy Without end” he and a colleague edited the entire Hong Kong film star Andy Lau’s demise 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 through which he stated 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 reduce 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, seems like Yoda, the “Star Wars” character who spoke in an idiosyncratic type. One headline learn, “a Abuse Aide And Conflict Normal on Rumsfeld.”
“He was obsessive, however not compulsive,” Ms. Chang, his sister, stated. “He was a collector. His condo 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 generally known as “The White Album.” He purchased one copy of it as a youngster, however when he bought 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 bought, the extra I may see how completely different these as soon as similar objects had grow to be,” he instructed the web site The Inventive Impartial in 2017. “I didn’t know the place it was going after I began aside from that I needed at the very least sufficient to see the variations between them. Then it simply saved 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 document store, with albums in bins and turntables to play the music.
One wall was crammed 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 photos. The covers additionally confirmed put on patterns created by rotting cardboard.
“Every album has aged uniquely and grow to be an artifact of the final half-century,” Mr. Chang instructed 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 an expert recording machine related 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 a number of the audio on his web site.
His vinyl document supplied a singular spin on “The White Album.” Variations within the manufacturing facility pressings and fluctuations within the pace of Mr. Chang’s turntable triggered oddities, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Instances in 2013: “Initially of ‘Expensive Prudence,’ you hear the primary line echoing a number of occasions, and by ‘Whereas My Guitar Gently Weeps’ the monitor is a virtually unrecognizable roar.”
Rutherford Chang was born on Dec. 27, 1979, in Houston to oldsters from Taiwan and grew up in Los Altos Hills, Calif., close to Palo Alto. His father, Jason, is a founding father of ASE Know-how 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 brighten a binder. All through his life, he would accumulate many different issues: baseball bats, lodge stationery, postcards, previous Chinese language megaphones, years’ price of receipts.
“He had a singular means of trying on the world,” Ms. Chang stated. “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 Road Journal, then reassembled them in alphabetical order right into a yearbook-like publication he referred to as “The Class of 2008.” He repeated a number of portraits; Barack Obama, who was elected president of the US that 12 months, seems 94 occasions, and John McCain, his Republican opponent, seems 74 occasions.
When it was exhibited on the White Area Gallery in Beijing in 2012, The Journal referred to 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 Sport Boy Tetris, the Nineties puzzle sport.
By then, he had been enjoying Tetris since childhood — his aim was to beat the rating of Steve Wozniak, a founding father of Apple — and recorded greater than 1,700 movies of his sport enjoying. The movies have been exhibited on the Container, a gallery in Tokyo, additionally in 2016.
Mr. Chang instructed The Guardian that 12 months that enjoying Tetris serially mimicked the drudgery of the trendy workplace, the place “we’re anticipated to repeat a selected activity time and again.” He added, “It’s the way in which capitalism makes us work, the place it’s important 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 instructed The Inventive Impartial, with no explicit aim.
He knew, he stated, that some hoarders have been exchanging money for rolls of pennies at banks after which checking out the extra precious ones from those made earlier than 1982, once they have been 95 p.c copper and 5 p.c zinc, making every one price as much as 3.1 cents. However, he stated, a hoarder couldn’t obtain a lot worth with out giant portions of the older copper.
“I’ve been excited about what I may do with melting them down,” he stated, “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 widespread 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 hundreds 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 have been housemates at Wesleyan. She stated that he had introduced persona 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 would possibly look obsessive, Ms. Sasamoto stated, “I discover it’s extra like a thoroughness, in keeping with private ritual and devotion. I relate it to somebody who meditates day-after-day. There was one thing religious about him.”
