UCCA Center for Contemporary Art · Beijing
17 January – 12 April 2026
CENTS was exhibited in Hundreds and Thousands at UCCA Beijing, the first institutional and most comprehensive solo exhibition of Rutherford Chang’s work. Surveying two decades of practice, the retrospective was co-curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari and the artist Aki Sasamoto, and presented in collaboration with the Estate of Rutherford Chang.
CENTS is made from 10,000 American pennies minted before 1982 and valued for their copper content. Chang photographed each coin to record its particular wear and patina, then had the collection pressed into a single 31-kilogram copper cube. The images were inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, tying digital renderings of physical currency to virtual systems of value.
At UCCA the collection could be explored on touchscreens or in a book, decades of circulation legible in the abrasions and discolouration of individual coins. With the U.S. Mint having permanently suspended penny production in November 2025, the copper block reads as a monument to the coin and to an economy in transition.
The exhibition set CENTS alongside We Buy White Albums (2006–2025), Game Boy Tetris (2013–2018), Class of 2008 (2008–2012), NBC Nightly News (2004), The Epic (2004–2005) and Portraits by Tone (2005). Together they trace a practice built on accumulation, repetition and the slow revaluation of ordinary things.
Installation views, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2026. Photography Sun Shi. Courtesy UCCA and the Estate of Rutherford Chang.
Rutherford Chang, CENTS, 2017–2024. Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands, 17 January – 12 April 2026, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Co-curated by Philip Tinari and Aki Sasamoto, in collaboration with the Estate of Rutherford Chang, established in 2025.