Entering the Gabriel Orozco show at Tate Modern, I smiled when I overheard people talking about “the box”. The day before an article had appeared in the Guardian about the white empty shoebox that sits seemingly randomly in the middle of a gallery. The journalist had spent a whole day observing people’s reactions to it. One visitor used it as a bin and someone else kicked it.

I couldn’t help but nudge it with my foot. The guard didn’t seem to notice until I told him. He took a good look and decided that it was still more or less in the right position. He clearly didn’t want to go through the laborious process of calling a colleague in another department authorised to handle art (with white gloves) to come down and reposition the box. When I expressed surprise, he said: “It’s artwork.”

The joke wouldn’t have been lost on Orozco: while visitors can interact with the box in a playful way, the Tate has to take it deadly seriously. Or perhaps he wanted to make a Duchampian point: the artist decides what is art and what isn’t. The curator says the shoebox actually stems from a much simpler idea: Orozco uses boxes like this one to store his ideas in.

In the short film accompanying the show (which you can watch on the Tate’s website), Orozco says he believes the purpose of art is not to entertain but to make people see things differently and heighten their awareness of themselves – so they “enjoy reality and life with more intensity”. I think this show is quite successful in that you walk away with your own shoebox of ideas that will impinge on how you see the world outside the gallery.

The Mexican artist’s work is a lot of fun and playfully challenges our perception of things: an old Citroën DS with its middle section cut out and put back together again, looks oddly elongated (Orozco wanted to be a racing driver when he was younger); bits of toilet roll flapping around a ceiling fan, like plane banners that form an elegant helix (the contrast with the loo roll is comical); and Carambole with Pendulum, a French version of billiards played on a table without pockets.

Inspired by Foucault’s Pendulum, Orozco had an oval table made and suspended the red ball above the table surface, forcing players to take the laws of physics into account and to come up with their own rules of engagement. There is also a chess board that is four times its usual size and wholly populated by knights, Horses Running Endlessly, 1995, and his toothpaste spit-out drawings, First Was the Spitting, 1993.

Working with found objects that he manipulates, often in a humorous manner, Orozco frequently uses his own body to make and shape the work, for example, an elevator is shrunk to his height. For one of his famous early pieces, My Hands Are My Heart, 1991, he pressed a piece of clay with both hands, leaving imprints of his fingers, and held it as though it was his heart.

Piedra que cede (Yielding Stone), 1992, is a large plasticine ball equal to his own weight (nearly 150 pounds) that he rolled through the streets of New York where it picked up debris and imprints along the way, documenting his journey through the city.

The show gets darker towards the end. One room has frayed parts of burst car and truck tyres spread across the floor, broken up by melted aluminium from the wheels, which he collected from Mexico’s highways (Chicotes, 2010). JG Ballard would have liked it.

The last room is hung with clothes lines that have grey pieces of lint of varying sizes draped over them. The delicate fabric contains the fibres, hair and flakes of skin that accumulate in the filters of tumble driers. Orozco describes these fragile materials as ‘very flat skins industrially produced’.

When he showed Lintels in New York just after the 9/11 attacks, it became a poignant reminder of the fragility of human life. It still is the most powerful piece in the show.

Gabriel Orozco is at Tate Modern until 25 April.