"General Course on Dunhuang Art" Author: Yang Qi Publisher: CITIC Publishing Group

Introduction
An introductory course on Dunhuang art written by a professor from Tsinghua University for the general public. Murals, silk paintings, colored sculptures, flying apsaras, music and dance, architecture, scriptures, food, clothing, housing and transportation... 10 dynasties, 250 exquisite pictures, detailing the 1,000-year evolution of Dunhuang art: Why were the Dunhuang Grottoes excavated? What are the differences in artistic styles between different dynasties? What stories do the murals tell? How to distinguish between Buddhist biography paintings, Jataka paintings, sutra paintings and karma paintings? How to identify colored sculptures? What are the characteristics of Eastern and Western sculptures? What is the relationship between donors and grottoes? How did flying apsaras gradually evolve into their current beautiful image? How did the ancient people of Dunhuang trade, get married, and have fun? ... "See a world in a grain of sand, and appreciate a paradise in a flower." Appreciating Dunhuang art also allows you to see the aesthetic creation of the Chinese people that transcends the times.
★Understand Dunhuang art and understand China’s magnificent artistic and cultural landscape.
Ji Xianlin said: There is only one place where the four major cultural systems in the world converge, and that is Dunhuang. Dunhuang art is a combination of painting, colored sculpture, and architecture. It is a three-dimensional epitome of ancient art and life. By understanding Dunhuang art, we can see the aesthetic creation of ancient Chinese people that transcends their time.
★10 dynasties, 250 works, detailing the 1,000-year evolution of Dunhuang art styles.
Murals, silk paintings, flying apsaras, colored sculptures, music and dance, scriptures, cave architecture, clothing and costumes, daily life... This book systematically describes every aspect of the Dunhuang Grottoes, integrating artistic knowledge into vivid narration, and leading readers to easily enter the door of Dunhuang art.
★14 introductory lessons for the general public to popularize the knowledge of Dunhuang art and culture.
Dunhuang art is full of wonders. There are flying fairies with "flying clothes and swaying walls", music and dance with "hundreds of thousands of celestial music playing without drums", graceful colored sculptures comparable to Venus, ingenious cave architecture, stories about good deeds, and real records of ancient secular life: politics and economy, weddings and funerals, clothing, leisure and entertainment, all of which are vivid and interesting.
★The binding highlights the quality, and the pictures and texts are carefully arranged to treasure the beauty of Dunhuang.
This is a hardcover reading book with a cover decorated with auspicious clouds and gilded colors; the inner pages are made of elegant paper to restore the classical Dunhuang colors.
About the Author
Yang Qi is a senior professor of the Department of Art History and Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University. In addition to teaching, he has been engaged in the popularization of mass art for a long time. He has served as an art consultant for CCTV's "World Culture Plaza" and a lecturer for Beijing Television's "Famous Teachers Forum" and "Chinese Civilization Lecture Hall". His published works include "Introduction to Art Studies" and "Five Thousand Years of Chinese Art".
Table of contents · · · · · ·
Preface
Lecture 1: The Millennium Vicissitudes of Mogao Grottoes
Lecture 2: The Centennial Cave of Blood and Tears
Lecture 3: Paying Homage to the Buddha Statue
Lecture 4: Magnificent Bodhisattva Statue
Lesson 5: The Singing and Dancing Flying Statue
Lecture 6: Life and deeds of Buddha
Lecture 7: Past and Future Lives: Jataka Paintings
Lecture 8: Buddhist sutra painting
Lecture 9: The causal relationship painting of saving sentient beings
Lecture 10: The Construction of Grotto Art
Lecture 11: People who funded the construction of the cave and supported it
Lesson 12: Dancing with the Music of Nature
Chapter 13: Worldly Feelings in the Buddhist World
Lecture 14: Theory of Grotto Art
Postscript: The evolution of Dunhuang art over the past thousand years