{"id":1913659,"date":"2026-05-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1913659"},"modified":"2026-05-01T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T06:00:00","slug":"rutherford-chang-rewrotes-what-a-square-could-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1913659","title":{"rendered":"Rutherford Chang Rewrotes What a Square Could Do"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Game-Boy-Tetris_Courtesy-Estate-of-Rutherford-Chang.png?w=618″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tArt history has been punctuated by debates over what a square can mean or do. For Kazimir Malevich, the black square was, in a sense, painting\u2019s building block\u2014a way to strip art down to its most fundamental form. For Ad Reinhardt, it marked an endpoint: He described his black canvases as the last paintings that could be made, as though abstraction had reached its logical conclusion. Of course, his was not the final word. Josef Albers continued the inquiry, nesting colorful quadrilaterals in his \u201cHomage to the Square\u201d series to reveal unexpected interactions of color and the ways they generate depth and space.<\/p>\n

\n\tRutherford Chang took this conversation a step further in the 21st century. His work, which was recently on view in a survey at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing, centers on squares\u2014but his are not abstract. Rather, they are insistently social. Chang\u2014who died last year at the age of 45\u2014undermines the cool detachment so often associated with the form: its equal sides, its 90-degree angles.<\/p>\n

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View of the exhibition \u201cRutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands,\u201d UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2026.<\/span>Photo Sun Shi. Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHis best-known piece, \u201cWe Buy White Albums\u201d (2013\u201325), was the heart of the exhibition. Over the course of more than a decade, Chang acquired as many copies as he could of the first pressing of the Beatles\u2019 \u201cWhite Album,\u201d ultimately amassing roughly one percent of the original three million copies before his death last year at age 45. The album\u2019s cover is famously white\u2014not empty but, instead, as an artwork by the Minimalist Richard Hamilton.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile some copies remain in pristine condition, their plastic sleeves intact, the majority bear marks of use. Many seem to have been treated as blank canvases, covered with butterfly stickers, hand-painted Beatles portraits, notes from a friend (\u201cI hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoy your company\u201d). Whether these are doodles or damage depends, in part, on one\u2019s system of values.<\/p>\n

\n\tQuestions of value, indeed, lie at the center of Chang\u2019s work. In another project, For CENTS #1\u2014#10,000<\/em> (2017\u201324), he collected 10,000 copper pennies\u2014minted before the US switched to zinc in 1982, after the value of a penny\u2019s copper had come to exceed one cent. Then, he registered each coin on the blockchain using the least valuable currency. Eventually, he melted all 10,000 down into a copper cube. The work moves between material and virtual economies, asking what, precisely, gives an object its worth.<\/p>\n

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Rutherford Chang: For CENTS #1\u2014#10,000<\/em>, (2017\u201324).<\/span>Photo Sun Shi. Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tChang often worked with a near-ritualistic discipline, his systematic processes opening onto moments of wonder. For The Class of 2008<\/em> (2008\u201312), he assembled all the Wall Street Journal\u2019s<\/em> iconic stippled portrait illustrations published in 2008. Arranged into a grid across framed pages like a yearbook, the work appears dry at first glance, even bureaucratic. Moving through the images feels like a romp around a year of both crisis and hope, as the economy crumbles and Obama is elected. Organized alphabetically, absurdist mashups ensue: Cher appears next to Dick Cheney. This is history unfolding not through its monumental events, but at a daily cadence.<\/p>\n

\n\tCirculation is another of Chang\u2019s key themes: how do things change as they move through the world? What traces do global systems\u2014finance, supply chains\u2014leave on objects and on people? \u201cWe Buy White Albums\u201d offers a clear example. These records passed through countless hands, accruing wear, annotations, and personal histories. Stripped of their \u201cmint\u201d condition, they lose one kind of value, only to gain another through Chang\u2019s intervention.<\/p>\n

\n\tAttention to systems formed a significant part of Chang\u2019s life. He was an artist with a job\u2014a traveling businessman working for his family\u2019s technology company in Taipei. He was embedded in financial, technological, and global networks all the time. Through his art, he found a way to foreground humanity and humor within systems, imbuing warmth into forms\u2014squares and cubes\u2014that might otherwise read as impersonal and cold.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis deadpan humor comes through most brilliantly in Game Boy Tetris<\/em> (2013\u201319), a parody of the logic of optimization that underpins capitalist culture. Responding to the pressure to constantly improve, compete, and become the best, he focused his effort on a deliberately trivial pursuit: mastering Tetris. Practicing relentlessly, he eventually ranked second in the world, just behind Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. He became, in other words, a champion of the square\u2014as his score, but also his show, boldly atttest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/rutherford-chang-ucca-beijing-survey-tetris-1234783323\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Game-Boy-Tetris_Courtesy-Estate-of-Rutherford-Chang.png?w=618″] Art history has been punctuated by debates over what a square can mean or do. For Kazimir Malevich, the black square was, in a sense, painting\u2019s building block\u2014a way to strip art down to its most fundamental form. For Ad Reinhardt, it marked an endpoint: He described his black canvases as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1913659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1913659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1913659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1913659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1913659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}