A few years ago I had a conversation with my kids about what they would do with my stuff when I die. I joked that if the sheer accumulation of it got too overwhelming, they could always hook one of those big slides up to the window of my apartment and shoot everything down to a dumpster below.

But maybe they could take a tip from Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong and turn it into art. His mom couldn’t throw anything away ever. Okay, she had an excuse. Fallen from a childhood of comfort and privilege to abject poverty in post-war China, she threw away nothing for fifty years. Soap was rationed to a bar and a quarter a month (makes you wonder about whose job it was to cut millions and millions of bars of soap into quarters). Over the years she saved managed to save enough fragments to equal a few bars of soap, which she planned to pass on to her children when they got married. Of course by then China had hit new levels of prosperity and the kids didn’t really need that old soap –or the scraps of fabric, string, empty soda and bleach bottles, broken toys, empty chocolate boxes, flower pots, dishes, cigarette packs, candy wrappers–but after a lifetime of adherence to wu jin qi yong (loosely translated as “waste not”), she couldn’t let it go.  Luckily Song Dong was able to persuade her to assemble it all by type and in 2005 it was shown in China as an art piece. Now it’s on display at MoMA through September 7, together with the frame of the tiny house that somehow held it all. So if your mom is a packrat, a trip to MoMA might cure her. It’s an amazing show.