In November 2025, WerkRaum is hosting a ceramics exhibition curated by wamono art, presenting Ryan Cheng’s and Yuko Fukuba Johnsson’s works:
WerkRaum collaborated with Yuko to create a unique and custom-fitted ceiling struture to suspend the art from above. The goal was for it to be structurally sound, elegant, unobtrusive and cost-efficient. It should not take attention away from the art. Ideally, the setup should be re-usable for other installations in the future as well.
Originally, the idea was to attach a metal grid to the ceiling, which was dropped due to stability issues. WerkRaum proposed to install metal tubes between the ceiling beams to build a base structure. We sourced re-inforced aluminum wardrobe hanging rods with matching brackets:
The artist supplied a drawing for the required layout. The green lines are the above aluminum poles, the grey bars are the beams on the ceiling. Yellow are short plastic PVC tubes.
We then designed a connector in a 3D CAD software with a small hole for a bolt to prevent the plastic tube from rotating in the socket or slipping out:
And printed 90 of them in PLA on our 3 printers:
We then sourced 11 PVC pipes as used for cable conduits, cut them to length and painted everything silver:
We hired a contractor to drill holes into the beams and install the rods:
Finally, we placed the 3-way connectors on the rods.
Then installed the painted plastic tubes, drilled holes and anchored them with bolts:
Overall time for the collaboration from first contact to finalization: 8 weeks.
Here is the final result.
This is my 5th time to install this series of work at a gallery space and every time suspension becomes a discussion point. But the system Werkraum developed is the leanest as if it is a part of the gallery. Thank you so much!