Rutherford Chang, a conceptual artist who turned his collection of the Beatles’ “White Album” into a meditation on the aging of a vinyl classic — and who, in another project, melted down 10,000 pennies into a copper block to make a statement about the value of each red cent — died on Jan. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He was 45.

His sister Danielle Chang said that a specific cause would not be determined for several months.

Mr. Chang’s projects were the fruit of a playful, obsessive mind. In “Andy Forever” he and a colleague edited all of the Hong Kong movie star Andy Lau’s death scenes, in chronological order of the films’ release, into a 27-minute video.

In another video, “Dead Air,” he removed all the words from President George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech (including those about the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein’s ambitions to build nuclear and biological weapons), leaving only his pauses, his breaths and the applause from the House chamber.

And he cut and pasted a 2004 front page of The New York Times, rearranging all the text into alphabetical order. Some of it, when read aloud, sounds like Yoda, the “Star Wars” character who spoke in an idiosyncratic style. One headline read, “a Abuse Aide And Clash General on Rumsfeld.”

“He was obsessive, but not compulsive,” Ms. Chang, his sister, said. “He was a collector. His apartment is so orderly, with nothing out of place, but he threw nothing away.”