When people describe Rutherford Chang’s work, you hear words like: obsessive, conceptual, minimalist. These descriptions aren’t wrong, they point to something real in his practice. But they also miss what makes his approach distinctive. Chang worked with objects that industrial culture designed to be identical: records pressed in millions of copies, portraits drawn according to strict house style, coins minted for perfect interchange. His interest lay in the precise moment when the promise of sameness begins to fail, when time and human handling leave marks that transform supposedly identical objects into singular things.
CENTS
Chang’s final major project takes his long-standing interest in units, standards, and systems of record-keeping and extends it into what has become an ongoing and in some ways autonomous condition. He completed the physical collection and documentation of ten thousand copper cents in 2023, at a moment when the one-cent coin was still in regular circulation throughout the United States. In 2024 the digital records of these ten thousand individual coins were inscribed onto Bitcoin, allowing the work to continue circulating and accumulating meaning beyond Chang’s direct control or intervention. Then, in a development that gives the entire project an another historical dimension, the U.S. Mint stopped producing the circulating one-cent coin on November 12, 2025. What this means is that in hindsight, with the perspective that historical distance provides, the penny itself has begun to read as a historical object, something that belongs to a particular moment of currency and exchange that is now passing into the past.
The project starts, like most of Chang’s work, from a condition that many people vaguely know about but rarely think through with any care or precision. Chang limited his collection specifically to cents minted before 1982, the year when the U.S. Mint changed the composition of the penny to reduce costs. Before 1982, pennies were made primarily of copper; after that date, they became copper-plated zinc. This seemingly minor detail has real consequences: pennies from the earlier period can, under certain market conditions, exceed their face value when considered purely as raw material. The copper content might be worth more than one cent. This creates an odd situation where the State continues to define each coin as being worth exactly one cent (and makes melting them for their metal content illegal), while the material reality of the object suggests a different value entirely. Chang doesn’t treat this as a paradox to resolve or a problem to solve. He treats it as a given, as one of the structural conditions that makes the work possible and interesting.
The process he developed is methodical and systematic. He removed ten thousand copper cents from circulation, pulling them out of the flow of exchange and use, and documented each one individually through detailed photography (obverse and reverse, better known as heads and tails). The coins were then smelted together into a single copper block weighing sixty-eight pounds. At this moment, individual units disappear entirely into undifferentiated mass. The penny’s ordinary role in exchange, its function as a discrete unit of value that can circulate and combine with other units, comes to a definitive end. But the block itself continues to exist in multiple forms. It was rendered as a detailed 3D digital model and inscribed as a single massive inscription filling the entirety of Bitcoin block #839969. This digital version was then sold at Christie’s in 2024, entering yet another system of value and circulation, moving from material object to digital record to collectible artwork in the contemporary art market.
The documentation, meanwhile, moves in the opposite direction from this consolidation. While the physical coins condense into a single unified object and lose their existence as separable, countable units, each individual cent remains readable as a distinct record. The photographic images stay separate and individuated, each one assigned to a fixed and permanent position in the set through inscription onto individual satoshis. What disappears completely at the level of material form — you can no longer hold these particular ten thousand pennies in your hand, can no longer sort through them or arrange them or put them back into circulation — remains perfectly intact at the level of the record. You can still look at the photograph of each specific coin, still examine the particular wear patterns and surface marks and small imperfections that distinguished it from the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others.
This structure allows CENTS to hold in tension several different and potentially conflicting ideas about where value is located and how it gets established and maintained. There’s value as defined by governmental authority: the State declares that this coin is worth one cent, and that declaration carries legal force. There’s value registered in material composition: the copper content might actually be worth more than one cent when calculated according to commodity prices. And there’s value produced through preservation and documentation: the decision to photograph each coin individually, to maintain the archive’s legibility over time, to treat these mass-produced objects as worthy of sustained attention. These different registers of value remain distinct within the work, not collapsing into a single unified meaning or resolving into some synthesis.
When we place CENTS alongside We Buy White Albums and think about them as part of a consistent practice, the underlying logic becomes clear. Objects that were designed and manufactured for perfect interchange, for being functionally identical and mutually substitutable, become readable as singular and individual once their circulation is interrupted and held still, once their particular histories are made visible through careful documentation and systematic archiving.
It’s worth noting here — because it matters for understanding how the work continues to function after Chang’s death — that CENTS was initiated through collaboration with Sovrn Art, an independent, artist-first platform that provided the initial framework and support for the project’s development. After the full inscription of the work onto Bitcoin was completed, a council formed independently of Chang himself, without his organization or oversight. This council is made up of collectors who chose, for their own reasons, to take responsibility for the work’s continuation and interpretation. The council members come from different generations and different professional fields, bringing various forms of expertise and perspective to their engagement with the archive. Their work has focused consistently on keeping the distinctions within the archive visible and legible — through close reading of the documentation, through careful cataloguing of variations and patterns, through writing that approaches the material from multiple angles and asks different kinds of questions. Their involvement has centered particularly on the problem of how to keep this archive readable and meaningful over time, how to maintain the precision and care of the record as it continues to circulate through systems and contexts that Chang himself could not have anticipated.
Archive as Practice
It is easy to call Rutherford obsessive. The sustained attention over years, the commitment to completeness and thoroughness, the willingness to spend enormous amounts of time and effort on projects built around deliberately narrow constraints. The word isn’t inaccurate. And yet it still manages to miss something important about the dimension of what Chang was actually doing with his time and attention. He treated mass culture and industrial production with a kind of patience that’s rare in contemporary art. He made rarity and singularity visible inside precisely those things we’ve learned to overlook or dismiss as generic and interchangeable. He listened carefully to what we might call the noise inside familiar symbols and objects — the small variations and accumulated marks that circulation and handling inscribe on surfaces that were designed specifically to resist such marking and remain stable over time.
This attention to what accumulates in the gaps and margins of systems designed for uniformity helps explain why Hundreds and Thousands works so effectively as a title for this retrospective. On one level, it simply names the scale at which Chang characteristically worked: collecting not dozens but hundreds, not hundreds but thousands of examples. But it also names something more fundamental. A discipline, a particular kind of methodical practice that requires looking long enough and carefully enough that difference begins to appear within what first presents itself as sameness. The practice keeps returning, with remarkable consistency across different projects and materials, to what circulation leaves behind: the marks and traces that accumulate even on objects designed to remain stable and unchanged.
Chang’s work can be read, in many ways, as a sustained practice of custody and care. He kept objects, pulled them out of circulation or gathered them from its margins. He indexed and organized them into systems that made their individual histories newly visible and legible. And then, crucially, he returned them to circulation in altered form: as archives open to examination, as exhibitions that invited direct encounter, as permanent records inscribed on Bitcoin. Through this process, he built situations and structures in which circulation itself becomes visible as a process. In which value turns concrete and measurable. The archive is consistently where this transformation takes place in his work — the site and the method through which individual objects become readable as parts of larger systems and patterns.
The retrospective gathers Chang’s method into a single frame and brings together projects from different moments in his career to demonstrate the underlying consistency of his approach across various materials and contexts. What remains is the structure he built, the archives he assembled with such care, the questions he persistently refused to resolve or close down prematurely. The promise of sameness keeps failing. Difference keeps appearing in the gaps and variations. The marks stay visible for anyone willing to look closely enough, and patiently enough, to actually see them.
This is a guest post by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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