Guardians of Dunhuang (5)

(People's Daily Online/Lin Shanshan)

Thousands of kilometers away from Dunhuang, designers in the tech giant company Tencent are blazing new trails in innovative cultural products of Dunhuang to further unleash the vitality of cultural relics dating back thousands of years. Kuishi (pseudonym of the interviewee), a character artist for Tencent's popular game, Honor of Kings, is one of them. Using the mural of Cave 220 as a prototype, she and her colleagues designed a new skin for the game character, bringing the ancient Huxuan dance, a fashionable dancing style in the Tang dynasty thrive, into the modern era.

This is not Kuishi's first time designing a Dunhuang-related cultural product. A few years ago, she developed gorgeous skin with a Dunhuang theme. The distinctive Dunhuang culture has always blown her mind. Kuishi was awestruck by the magnificent visual arts of Dunhuang when she first visited Mogao Grottoes for designing flying apparatus skin, and this time she has a deeper understanding of Dunhuang culture.

"When we visited Cave 220 for the new skin, I not only saw its visual beauty but was also impressed by the multiculturalism and inclusiveness behind those murals," said Kuishi, noting that the Huxuan dance, which came from Western regions and spread into China, embodies the flourishing of international cultural exchanges in Dunhuang.

The cultural relics reflect the artists' spiritual world, which epitomizes the art and culture of that time. "What we are doing now is using digital means to interpret the ancient beauty in an innovative way, disseminating its spiritual and cultural meaning to the public," said Kuishi.

The new skin became a hit in the game industry. Kuishi and her colleagues successfully helped this age-old performance stage a comeback. "Just like the ancient artist left the most brilliant moment of popular Huxuan dance on the mural, we want to remodel the most beautiful moment of the past and keep it from decaying over time," said Kuishi.