New Normal's many dimensions

The New Normal: China, Art, and 2017 at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art displays works by artists from home and abroad.

Beijing-based Liang Ban, 32, often uses daily-use objects to portray historic and political events and personal experiences as art.

His works range from paintings and videos to installations.

His work, titled A Poet Who Never Saw the Ocean Wrote a Novel about the Ocean, dwells on the refugee crisis that has swept Europe since 2015.

In the work, seven microphones are suspended in air in a passage-like space. When visitors walk below them, they can hear the sound of waves.

The audio recordings were made by Liang's friends in Europe. They went to beaches in Greece, Italy, Spain and on the Balkan Peninsula that once witnessed attempts by potential refugees to enter Europe.

Liang says that although the waves have washed away the traces of refugee landings, the sounds of the waves give people an "indelible" feeling of the incidents.

Li Qi, 33, who divides time between Beijing and Chengdu, probes the anxiety of factory workers in Dongguan, a city in southern Guangdong province, that is seeing a decline in its manufacturing sector.