This is an installation piece by Chinese artist Song Dong in the MOMA that kind of puts my compulsive collecting in perspective! The artist's mother grew up in hard times in Communist China and hoarded everything incase one day it would be useful, even when times were better. When the artist's father died, he convinced his mother to let go of all these things, and their final use would be as a piece of art. Shortly after this his mother also died. It was a huge room filled with all her these things that she held onto her whole life all neatly stacked up in rows, in and around the timber frame of her old house. It was pretty amazing to see, especially after knowing that she had died, as it was literally her whole life laid out in one room. There was everything from old broken tvs, children's toys, plastic bottles and food packaging and even tiny old bits of string and empty tubes of toothpaste. If anyone gets the chance to go then do, it's pretty remarkable.
