The first Pingtan Cross-Straits Common Homeland Painting and Calligraphy Exhibition was held in Pingtan county, Fujian province last month.

Calligraphers and painters from across the Taiwan Straits create art works on site during an arts exhibition in Pingtan, July 19. [pingtan.gov.cn]

More than 200 works by 48 artists from the mainland and Taiwan were showcased.

One of the most eye-catching was a scroll of Buddhist texts by Taiwanese calligraphy practitioner Zhang Houlun. The regular script characters are so tiny that they cannot be identified without a magnifying glass.

Zhang, 60, said there are around 30,000 micro Chinese characters on the scroll, which took him three months to complete.