Rutherford Chan transformed the Beatles' “White Album” collection into a vinyl classic aging meditation, melting 10,000 pennies into copper blocks in another project, and the value of each Red Cent – at his Manhattan home on January 24th He has died. He was 45 years old.
His sister, Daniel Chang, said the specific cause would not be determined for several months.
Chang's project was a playful and obsessive result. In “Andy Forever,” he and his colleagues edited the death scenes of Hong Kong movie star Andy Lau into a 27-minute video over the chronological order of the film's release.
In another video, “Dead Air,” he removes all words from President George W. Bush's 2003 Union Speech (including those relating to the Iraqi tyranny's ambitions to build nuclear weapons). did. Breathing and applause from the room at home.
He then cut and pasted the 2004 front page of the New York Times, re-arranging all the text alphabetically. Some of it sounds like Yoda, a Star Wars character who spoke in a singular style when read aloud. One headline read: “Rumsfeld's abuse aide and clash general.”
“He was an obsession, but not obsessive,” said his sister, Chang. “He was a collector. His apartment was very neat and out of place, but he didn't throw anything away.”
Mr. Chan was not originally a collector for the 1968 double LP, The Beatles. He bought one copy of it as a teenager, but when he got two seconds a few years later, he noticed that two plain white covers as blank canvas – changed over time.
“The more I got, the more I could see how different these once identical objects were,” he told the Creative Independent in 2017. At least enough to see the differences between them. Then it just kept going and I can't stop. ”
Chang's installation, We Buy White Albums, which was presented at the Manhattan Rest Gallery in 2013, took the form of a record store facsimile and performed albums in bins and turntables with music.
One wall was filled with albums named by the owners. Some people drew pictures. The cover also shows wear patterns created by rotten cardboard.
“Each album has a unique aging and has become an artifact of the last half century,” Chan told the website Hyperallercic in 2013.
The exhibition also had an audio component, traveling to several cities in 2014, including Liverpool, the Beatles home.
When he heard a copy of “White Album” in the gallery, Chang created digital recordings using a professional recording device connected to a turntable. He later made the studio electronically 100 layers, and became a thrust of 1,000 vinyl records with all the static, scratches and skips of the original recording. He sold several copies for $20 each, trading the other copies for more “white albums” (his collection reached 3,417 copies). He also posted some of the audio on his website.
His vinyl records provided a unique spin on “The White Album.” The fluctuations in speed and fluctuations in Mr. Chang's turntable's speed have caused strange things, Alan Kojin wrote in the 2013 Times: My guitar crying gently, and the tracks are barely recognizable rouds. ”
Rutherford Chan was born in Houston on December 27, 1979 to Taiwanese parents and grew up in Los Altos Hills, California, near Palo Alto. His father, Jason, is the founder of the semiconductor company ASE Technology Holding, and his mother, Ching Ping (Hsiang) Chang, is a retired interior designer who manages the home.
Rutherford's earliest collection was a small sticker with fruit when he was a child, which he used to decorate the binder. Throughout his life he collected many other things, including baseball bats, hotel stationery, postcards, old Chinese megaphones, and year's receipts.
“He had a unique way to see the world,” Chan said. “He saw beauty in everyday objects.”
He majored in psychology while taking an art course at Wesleyan University, earning his bachelor's degree in 2002 before serving as an assistant to the Manhattan artist Xu Bin for two years. He then worked on his projects in Singapore and Beijing.
In 2008, he clipped around 4,000 ink dot portraits from the Wall Street Journal and reassembled them in alphabetical order. He repeated several portraits. Barack Obama, who was elected president of the United States that year, appears 94 times, with his Republican opponent, John McCain, appearing 74 times.
When exhibited at the White Space Gallery in Beijing in 2012, the journal called Chang's project “trying to record this year's events with a window of lighting to journal priorities and thought processes.”
Mr. Chan transformed his appeal to video games into performance art. In 2016 he streamed live on a platform that attempted to achieve the world's highest score in the 1990s puzzle game Game Boy Tetris.
By then, he had been playing Tetris since he was a child (his goal was to beat the score of Apple founder Steve Wozniak). The video was exhibited in 2016 at The Container, a gallery in Tokyo.
Chang told the Guardian that playing Tetris mimics the drighery of a modern office, “we are expected to repeat certain tasks over and over.” He added, “It's the way capitalism makes us work and we have to achieve more than others.”
His high score of 614,094 was second in the world rankings for a while.
Chang's last major project, “Sent,” investigated the nature of value and was pinned down in both analog and digital worlds. Around 2017, he casually began to put Penny aside from the changes he had undergone, he told the Creative Independent without any special goals.
He knew that some hoarders exchanged cash with a bank's penny roll, then sorted out more valuable things from those made before 1982. 3.1 cents. However, he said the hoarders could not achieve much value without a large amount of old copper.
“I've been thinking about what I can do by melting them,” he said. “Penny is something we all have in our pockets. It's the lowest common denominator, it's kind of junk and it doesn't seem like nothing.”
He eventually realized what he was going to do. He has collected 10,000 pennies since before 1982. It was documented, etched into blockchain, digital databases, and melted into 68 pound cubes.
The 3D model of the Cube was auctioned off by Christie in Bitcoin order, a digital asset of $50,400. Mr. Chan held the physical cubes. Meanwhile, in the open market.
In addition to his sister Daniel and his parents, Mr. Chan was survived by another sister, Madeline Chan, and his partner, Tsubasa Narita.
Sasaki, an artist and professor at Yale School of Art, was a housemate at Wesleyan, so he watched Mr. Chan build a body for work. She said that he is an area where he brings personality to conceptual art and often lacks it, and that he is an inspiring observer of cultural phenomena and new media.
While his work may seem obsessive, Sasamoto said: I associate it with someone who meditates every day. There was something spiritual about him. ”
