Art, as they say, talks. As I wave down a taxi on the main road outside what were once 50s-Soviet-style military factories and are now the artists’ quarter of Beijing called 798 Art District, everything is lost is frantically enacted translation.

I try to draw five rings in the air, I try to break the word Olympics down to more syllables than can be uttered in a single breath, but the driver stares back uncomprehendingly. Till I dive into a now-bulging bag of art catalogues, and show him a postcard of 89-year-old Wu Guanzhong’s artistic depiction of the Bird’s Nest, or the National Stadium, where the opening ceremony will take place, and in whose environs is located the Media Press Centre. And off we go.

The venues have to be experienced to believe how disorienting they can be. It’s wonderful, of course, that at every corner you relearn the human geography of the planet by running into a journalist from Mozambique, or Switzerland, or Zimbabwe, or Japan, and find a profile of their countries from the sports they are following.

But with total immersion, the Olympic city can feel like a bubble that floats from city to city every four years. Exhibitions of Olympic art at many of the galleries in 798 provide a refuge to recuperate in, to find local anchors of the Olympics phenomenon, before heading back to the pre-opening ceremony excitement at the Bird’s Nest.

Holding court

At the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, a small, mainly Chinese and very young audience has gathered to hear Norman Foster (British architect of iconic structures such as London’s Millennium Bridge and the “Gherkin”, restorer of the Reichstag in Berlin, and the man who conceptualized Beijing’s Terminal 3) in conversation with Ai Weiwei.

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