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.

Ai is a man of many talents. He is a leading and, as it turns out, an amusingly laconic artist. He was part of the great batch of filmmakers who enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, along with, for instance, Zhang Yimou, director of the Olympics opening.

He was design consultant with the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron for the Bird’s Nest, but has been periodically critical of it and at one point claimed that he was so wary of being rude at having reporters ask him the same questions about the design that he was planning to flee Beijing during the Games. But today he is here, to talk about Becoming, his documentation with photographs of the construction of Terminal 3.

Foster says his design is a celebration of travel. And the grandness allowed to him while conceptualising the airport, he says, is anchored in the frenetic construction in the city. But Ai Weiwei keeps drawing more out of Foster than just praise for the boldness of Beijing’s decision-making and strategic investment in infrastructure.

What kind of afterlife may the airport have, Weiwei forces Foster to consider. And when asked about designing talking-point buildings against a grey sky, Foster counters with observations that Beijing has been amazingly greened. Weiwei draws laughter by saying, single-toned: “We are working on the weather, and I’m sure you’ll see some blue days. I hope you’ll enjoy the blue days.”

So, what’s the afterlife for the Bird’s Nest, he must be asked later when it’s polite to stray away from the subject of the morning. “I’m sure it’ll be well-used,” he says. And no, he does not feel any sense of ownership of the marvellous structure of latticed steel.

Fat chance

At Art Bridge, there is an “art exhibition to acclaim the Olympics”. And along with Wu’s silk-screen prints, Pan Dehai’s “fat guys” are colourfully striving to be number one, running and cycling, lifting weights and tearing over hurdles. Catalogues quote him as saying: “Fat is the theme I want to express. Fat is a phenomenon that exists widely in society. It is an obvious embodiment of the city syndrome and also one existent problem that lies in individuals at any moment nowadays.”

But if I show the bubbly faced characters to the next taxi driver, what chance that I would be transported to a Games venue?