Over the course of more than two decades, late conceptual artist Rutherford Chang developed a body of work in which mass collections of commonly circulated objects explore how value is constructed through the collective beliefs of networked cultures, both on and offline. Centered on meticulously collected everyday objects such as pennies, the Beatles’ The White Album, newspaper clippings, Tetris points, Chang’s focus ultimately encompasses what is beyond the objects themselves. Instead, his disciplined attention to the acts of collection, sorting, reclassication, comparison, and recontextualization exposed underlying systems and social structures that create meaning and value.

On the occasion of Chang’s first survey exhibition, Hundreds and Thousands at UCCA Beijing, this conversation brings together Tsinghua media and communications scholar Wu Jingwei, and Executive Director of Rhizome and editor of The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, Michael Connor (Online participation), to reflect on Chang’s practice through a lens of contemporary networked culture. The conversation will be moderated by Zandie Brockett, Head of Special Projects of the Estate of Rutherford Chang.

Chang’s durational and process-driven practice gathered traces of the public’s gestures, exchanges, and histories embedded in these ordinary objects. Through them, he invited us, as participants in the systems his work reflects, to find a new way of seeing the latent architectures that shape our contemporary, post-Internet lives. The discussion will explore how Chang’s monk-like discipline infused with an absurdist humor anticipated many of the questions central to the flow of information and meaning in material culture today: What does it mean to treat circulation itself as a medium? How and why do objects accumulate value as they pass through social systems whether fan cultures, collector communities, or media infrastructures? And, how might we understand the constraints of these system’s algorithms while imagining new ways of navigating and relating within the web?