Word: artistically
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...summer day, artist Tan Swie Hian, 60, stands poised before a four-story-high canvas in the middle of St. Marcos Square, surrounded by Venice's celestial domes. Suddenly, Tan leaps toward the immense sheet, wielding his brush like a swordsman as he swiftly inscribes an immense poem; inky Chinese characters that tell of sleeping pillows and dreamy, butterfly wings. Singapore's most famous artist is doing at the Venice Biennale what he has long done back home in East Asia: combining East and West, through multiple disciplines, with the explosive precision of a bombmaker...
...Singapore, a country that has struggled to produce artists who excel in even one medium, it's startling to find someone like Tan, who has thrived in so many different art forms and has achieved international acclaim for all. In January, Tan won the Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum, which held a major exhibition of his works at Davos. Tan is also currently building the first Earth Art Museum in Qingdao, China?a $690,000 project that sprawls over two mountainous kilometers?where Tan directs a crew of carvers to inscribe his calligraphy into the rock-filled museum...
Then he gently emphasized, in a homespun analogy that drew on his affection for craftsmen and construction, the importance of compromise: "When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here, both sides must part with some of their demands...
...popularity of Six Feet Under, the HBO series about a family of undertakers, and the success of novels like The Lovely Bones, about a dead girl who watches her family from heaven, and this summer's The Dogs of Babel, in which an artist makes fanciful death masks, have helped give people new ways to look at death. Recent waves of immigrants have also made people more comfortable with diverse funeral customs. But it's the demographic might of the baby boomers, finally coming to terms with their mortality, that has sent the $17 billion funeral and cemetery industry scrambling...
...accident that the Benjamin Franklin you see on our cover is portrayed as a kind of action hero. Of all the founding fathers, he was early America's boldest intellectual adventurer, making history in every realm from science to business to statesmanship. "My goal," says artist Michael Deas, who painted the cover, "was to present Franklin as a vigorous, flesh-and-blood person, not the somewhat frumpy figure we see on the face of a $100 bill." During the 84 years of his amazing life, it was a rare moment that Franklin, young or old, wasn't hatching an innovation...