On a rainy afternoon recently Rutherford Chang sat at a desk near the window of the Recess Gallery in SoHo, listening to “The Beatles” — the two-disc set, released in 1968, and commonly known as “The White Album,” and showing a visitor a computer printout listing of several hundred copies of the album he owns.

Mr. Chang, a soft-spoken, 33-year-old artist who was born in Houston and grew up in California, is fascinated with “The White Album,” particularly with first-edition copies. As readers of a certain age will recall, the original release sported an embossed title, and each copy carried a serial number, as if it were a limited edition. Actually, about three million numbered copies were printed in the United States before EMI stopped numbering them in 1970. The embossed title was replaced with gray printing in 1975.

Through March 9 Mr. Chang is presiding over “We Buy White Albums,” an installation at Recess devoted to this fascination and its artistic ramifications.

“I was interested in the different ways that the covers aged,” said Mr. Chang, holding up one as an example. “Being an all-white cover, the changes are apparent. The serial numbers made collecting them seem natural, and the more I got, the more interesting it became. As you see, many of them are written on, and each has a story. The accumulation of the stories is part of it. But it’s also about how the physical object — the record — just doesn’t exist anymore” in an age when music is sold through downloaded files.