Rutherford Chang
Hundreds and Thousands
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Rutherford Chang (1979–2025) died much too young, and remained, in crucial ways, a child of games to the end. A corner of his posthumous retrospective at UCCA Beijing was dedicated to Game Boy Tetris: between 2013 and 2018, he recorded hundreds of hours of sessions of himself playing Tetris on an original Nintendo Game Boy, uploading over 2,000 plays to a dedicated website and streaming his attempts to climb the global rankings on Twitch. These recordings flickered on small monitors hung at uneven heights, perhaps echoing the device’s intimate scale and handheld nature, the consoles themselves displayed nearby. Framed drafts of letters written by Chang to Nintendo Power magazine, already defunct at the time, document in ultraformal prose that his scores had surpassed those of Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, whose published records he had set out to beat. One marked-up sentence reads, with poignant, characteristic exactitude: On September 8, 2015, I achieved reached a score of 614,094 . . . which according to Twin Galaxies currently ranks me as #2 worldwide in “points.”