Obituary | Art world, family mourn artist Rutherford Chang, Taiwan semiconductor firm founder’s son
The artist, a scion of Taiwan’s Advanced Semiconductor Engineering family who died aged 45, remembered as ‘warm’ and ‘endlessly curious’
Tributes are pouring in from the international art community for Rutherford Chang, the American-Chinese artist.
Chang is best known for making a video collage of Hong Kong actor Andy Lau Tak-wah’s movie death scenes, exhibiting as a piece of conceptual art his own massive collection of copies of The Beatles’ White Album, and melting 10,000 copper US pennies into a single cube.
His singular art practice was all the more unusual because he was the son of Taiwanese billionaire Jason Chang, and considered the heir apparent of a large semiconductor and property empire.
Born and raised in the United States, Chang majored in psychology at Wesleyan University, a private liberal arts university in the state of Connecticut, where he shared accommodation with Aki Sasamoto – a Japanese artist now based in New York.
“He would be labelling everything he lived with, using embossing tape. Everybody around him knew him with ‘his way of doing things’. None of these were activities he did for class, which was for me the proof that an artful way of living was simply part of him.”