During the Tang Dynasty, the material cultures were presented in distinct ways. From the holistic point of view, due to a brand new trend of arts, the poets, art historians and connoisseurs made an effort to portray observable phenomena of human behaviours, such as emotions, movements, motivations and traditional customs.Dunhuang Research Institute 2000 They often took preparatory sketches in order to organise the positions of different figures and objects. They also used more colors to make the paintings colourful and magnificent.Whitefield, Whitefield and Agnew 2000 Through these tiny details, the artists showed their great skills at capturing complex emotions in facial expressions and body gestures. There is a story about a famous artist called Wu Daozi that can be seen as an example to explain the main drawing trend in the Tang dynasty. It is said that Wu Daozi had painted some dragons with vivid scales that seemed to be flying into the sky. On days when it was about to rain, the mist would rise surround the drawing.Fraser 2004 In other words, the popular painting style in the Tang dynasty was to conflate illusion and reality to make people approach the core spirit of truth. The material culture in Dunhuang, especially in the aspects of performance, has preserved these auras.
