Akin to Chinese calligraphy and Chinese landscape painting (fig.), characters in Chinese script can be made in coloured and finely granulated jade onto the surface of paper, creating an modern objet d'art that is known as jade sand painting. The characters depicted here are ai (爱), meaning ‘love’ and ‘affection’, and jia (家), which can be translated as ‘family’, ‘home’ and ‘house’.