‘I was really angry at this fly,’ the artist Madelon Vriesendorp explains with a grin as I hold out my hand to shake hers, which is in a splint. ‘I jumped onto the bed to swat it, fell over and broke my wrist.’ Vriesendorp is showing me around her latest exhibition, which follows a long list of achievements: she co-founded the ground-breaking architectural practice OMA, and her illustrations of architectural theory defined its visual language for a generation. Now in her late seventies, she’s still characteristically unserious, except about one thing: ‘I’m very serious about jokes.’

Not taking out the bins has been made into an art form by Vriesendorp

The exhibition, Cosmic Housework, is Vriesendorp’s reinterpretation of Cosmic House, the home-turned-museum of Charles Jencks, the late architectural theorist-designer. It’s a space she knows well, having been his long-time friend and collaborator. Not your usual white-cube exhibition space, Cosmic House is a colourful explosion of postmodern puns.

As the symbolic and sensory overload of his house and her work vie for your attention, Vriesendorp proves to be a worthy sparring partner. She colonises the Cosmic House’s nooks and crannies with her own absurd additions. A ‘handelier’ of cardboard forearms hangs within the Solar Staircase. Disembodied body parts lie strewn across Jencks’s city-shaped sofas – a surreal, Addams Family version of the pine cones in National Trust properties that keep you off the fragile items. There’s also a literal foot in the door.

Household plastic waste is her preferred medium, stemming from a burst of productivity under lockdown. Bold necklaces are made from printer-cartridge caps, insects from cartons, and bouquets from bottles. Where Michelangelo sees statues ready to be freed from blocks of marble, Vriesendorp liberates swans from milk jugs. A lake of them frolic in the house’s jacuzzi, famously shaped like an upturned baroque dome. Not taking out the bins has been turned into an art form.

Jencks’s absence is palpable. In his wife Maggie’s study, with its cathartically bland décor, the exhibition becomes a mini-retrospective of Vriesendorp and Jencks’s creative partnership. There are Vriesendorp’s cartoons of the Guggenheim Bilbao morphing into a mermaid, which show how intrinsically suggestive postmodern buildings can be. For Jencks, postmodernism provided iconography for an agnostic age. The ‘Cosmic Suit’, made for Jencks to wear at a Cosmic House party, completes the total work of art that was his life. But in the rest of the house, without Jencks, Vriesendorp is playing entirely for her own amusement.

Down the road, another house-museum is hosting new artistic guests. Leighton House, the former home of artist Frederic Leighton, is a jewel of Victorian orientalism, with its Arab Hall adorned in 16th-century Damascene tiles. Pakistan-born artist Maha Ahmed shares Leighton’s spirit of gazing to the Orient, but in this exhibition she looks even further east – to Japan. Classically trained in Lahore in miniature painting, a tradition with Persian and Mughal influences, Ahmed renders fantastical landscapes exquisitely with this technique. Among rock formations and trees are a menagerie of Japanese cranes, monkeys and beasts, all painstakingly etched with fine squirrel-hair brushes (see below). It has a melancholy air. The cultural and linguistic alienation that she felt while working in Tokyo for three years seeps into the paintings. Traditional motifs from Japanese visual culture are common in her work. None of these are imitations, but reinventions: she paints chimeric beasts that combine features across species as she traverses cultures.

‘Silence Your Demons’, 2020, by Maha Ahmed

‘Obviously we were colonised, but the manuscripts are preserved much better here,’ says Ahmed

There’s a sincere curiosity shared by both Leighton and Ahmed towards eastern cultures – a far cry from the bad-faith accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ or Edward Said’s finger-wagging about orientalism. Ahmed dismisses this baggage: ‘It’s not about taking, it’s about appropriating something which you love so much.’ The exhibition’s centrepiece, commissioned by Leighton House, unmistakably honours the shade of turquoise from the tiles in Leighton’s stairwell. Shame, however, that they’ve chosen to display the work in the austere basement gallery, added in a recent renovation and isolated from the cross-cultural alchemy of Leighton’s rooms.

While studying in London, Ahmed sought inspiration from the British Museum’s own miniature painting collection: ‘Obviously we were colonised, but the manuscripts are preserved much better here. The work that was left behind was not that well-kept, and a lot of it was lost.’

At Central Saint Martins, she struggled to challenge the oversimplified narratives of her peers. Her best works, inky paintings where intricate details emerge as your eyes adjust to the gloom, were constantly misinterpreted as being about the forced veiling of women in burqas. Learning from Leighton and Ahmed, it might benefit us in the West to reintroduce some nuance in how we relate to other cultures. But for that, we first need to get our own house in order.