Research On Landscape Elements In Dunhuang

Dunhuang frescoes are China’s excellent national cultural and artistic treasures and our inexhaustible sources of art,in which we can see extremely decorative artistic language,feel strong colors that are gorgeous but not vulgar.There are also a wide range of subjects,such as storytelling paintings,sutra paintings,landscape paintings,Buddha paintings,flowers and birds paintings and so on.Any subject in Dunhuang frescoes appears to be particularly decorative.Among them,landscape paintings are always appear as a background and play a supporting role,are an indispensable part in the frescoes.During the Sui Dynasty,the traditional landscape painting stood out from the background of figure painting and became an independent type of painting step by step.Consequently,the landscape in Dunhuang frescoes in the Tang Dynasty became more clear,even close to the traditional green landscape painting at that time.In this period,a new type of landscape paintings appeared,that is,the Chinese ink landscape painting represented by Wang Wei.Since then,landscape paintings were divided into green landscape paintings and ink landscape paintings,and Dunhuang frescoes were created obviously based on the green landscape paintings.Due to the limitations of materials and techniques,the landscape in Dunhuang frescoes was a bit different from that of the traditional green landscape.The landscape paintings tended to be more decorative,which can be seen from the landscape elements in the frescoes.The features of the mountains,rocks,grass,trees and water in them were all beyond decorative portrayal.Although the landscape in Dunhuang frescoes tended to be more and more real in the Tang Dynasty,its recapitulative artistic language still had decorative meaning.Therefore,this paper focuses on exploring the landscape elements in Dunhuang frescoes,analyzing from the elements in the grottos with landscape elements in the Northern Wei Dynasty to those in the Western Wei Dynasty,the Northern Zhou Dynasty,the Sui Dynasty,the Tang Dynasty and the Western Xia Regime.The auther tries to explore the artistic language of the landscape elements in the Dunhuang frescoes.