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"I'm giving it big side-windows. People are gonna want to see the driver of this car," says Leepu Awila, "not just their face but what they're wearing, their trousers or skirt. I got the idea at the aquarium. I thought: if I can see the fish, the fish can definitely see me."

When maverick Bangladeshi automotive artist Leepu Awila designs a car, he doesn't take his inspiration from the usual places. "I'm inspired by nature: flowers, animals, birds, fish..." he says. "If you look at cars you won't be original."

His RMX-1 is a true one-off, sketched on the fly by Awila freehand on a flipchart, its form battered out of raw sheet steel in a matter of six weeks by men with mallets. Somewhere under there are the rusted bones of an ancient Capri, and welded on top are the roof and back window hacked off a scrap Calibra - but they are both now appropriated into Awila's art.

And art it is. So it's in a gallery. In fact, the whole design and construction process took place there too. Call it performance art, an installation, whatever - I'm just thrilled that car culture is now a legitimate subject for the art world.

Awila normally builds his cars in a Dhaka workshop. Now he's in London as the first-ever artist-in-residence at Rich Mix, a new crosscultural arts centre in the east end. The car was built in full view of the Bethnal Green Road through the gallery's windows and now the finished version has moved across to Rich Mix's cafe - always the busiest part of an arts centre.

Less than a mile away, at the Barbican Centre's Curve gallery, another exhibition that uses a familiar vehicle entirely repurposed is about to open. London artist Richard Wilson has taken an FX4 taxi and mounted it on scaffolding, upended as if in freefall off a cliff. A huge bite has been taken out of the front corner.

Look through it into the engine bay, and from there a tunnel has been hacked backward through the dash, burrowing onward through a suitcase alongside the driver, then via the bulkhead, the back seat and finally out through the boot. A series of circular holes in the side, roof and doors turns the whole car into black Emmental.

Yes, it's baffling. But it's also funny, captivating and disorienting. It's like an X-ray, full of little mechanical revelations, but it won't quite surrender its meaning.

The other part of the taxi exhibit is an intensely claustrophobic film, a series of close-ups of a man crushed into small dark metal-walled spaces, cutting his way out.