Endless Arcades: Curated Retail and the Experience of Numbness in China

by Xiaoqian (Chelsea) Zhong April 13th, 2026

What do you see when you search “exhibition” on social media? When I start researching a new project with my creative curatorial team, I open the platform we use most often. This helps me gauge where people's focus and daily habits are trending.

On Xiaohongshu (RedNote)—the Chinese platform that sits somewhere between Instagram and a search engine—users look up “where to go,” “what to see,” or “how to take pictures.” One type of exhibition frequently appears there: not in traditional cultural institutions like museums or galleries, but inside large shopping centers across China. Clicking through a few posts about “visiting an exhibition” (“kan zhan”), you might notice that they come from different people, different cities, different malls. But after a while, it becomes hard to distinguish one from another. Each photo, each piece of content, seems to follow a familiar, almost predictable track. You don’t even need to go in person to get a rough sense of what the “exhibition” looks like.

Parc Central 2025 Christmas & Labubu Pop-up. Image from publicly available posts on RedNote.

Shenzhen Bay MixC 2025, Xiamen The MixC 2025 & Shanghai The MixC 2026. Image from publicly available posts on RedNote.

For a curatorial team working with commercial centers, this kind of research result obviously benefits. As long as one can grasp the current trend, it already counts as a good starting point, which is already half the success. Compared to creative inspiration, what often matters more is to grab the emerging mood and turn it into a reason for people to engage. Of course, I am not suggesting that originality and creativity are unnecessary. The real challenge lies in how we pitch to our clients and stand out from competitors in a crowded field. For large shopping malls, unlike cultural institutions, consumption is the ultimate goal, while art is more of a tool or a means rather than an end in itself.

These so-called “art exhibitions” in contemporary Chinese commercial spaces are clearly distinct from conventional exhibitions. They usually lack captions or complex interpretive systems and instead feature large, visually striking installations with straightforward meanings, often situated in atriums or open-air gardens. Their target audiences are primarily young people and families. Strictly speaking, such projects might be closer to “marketing” than genuine “art exhibitions,” but the very label of “exhibition” grants these commercial ventures a layer of cultural legitimacy.

It’s no surprise, then, that the term naturally entered everyday usage. “Visiting an exhibition” has become a core discourse in commercial promotion. Even when most people are aware that, at its heart, it is essentially an “invitation to shop” dressed up in aesthetic packaging, they still willingly participate. The reasons are simple: strolling through a mall, wandering an atrium or garden, snapping a few photos, and posting them on social media costs almost nothing. Sometimes there’s even a small “reward.” Organizers might set up simple participation rules—tag a specific hashtag to receive a small gift or gain more visibility. These mechanisms are gentle; participants rarely feel “used.” On the contrary, they often perceive it as a fair exchange. Unwittingly, users become part of the dissemination chain, while the “reward” reinforces the legitimacy of this voluntary labor.

Searching for keywords on the platform—such as mall names like “MixC” (“wan xiang tian di”) and “Parc Central” (“tian huan”); holiday tags like “Christmas” or “Year of the Horse”; exhibition subjects like “Labubu”; or general phrases such as “installation exhibition” or “exhibition in XX city”—instantly returns massive amounts of content. A key issue is that these posts are highly homogenous: they show similar photographic angles, use repeated title structures, and employ nearly identical language. Scrolling through a few pages reveals repetitive content that becomes overwhelming. This uniformity is so strong that, without even visiting, users can almost completely understand the exhibition simply by browsing.

Parc Central 2025 New Year. Screenshots from publicly shared posts on RedNote.

At this point, I did indeed obtain the most useful thing for the early stage of a project. After going through several festivals, different themes, and a full cycle of seasons, I realized that we have actually been running along the same track, which offers only limited novelty, mostly expressed through changes in displayed objects and adjustments in modes of interaction. And yet, even so, each event still generates its own peak moment, and people do not seem to grow tired of visiting, which is reflected in the fact that you can always find promotional posts that rely on more or less the same set of words. The paradox is that this overabundance of accessible information does not diminish people’s desire to attend. On the contrary, it often intensifies the impulse to visit offline. Even though the installations themselves rarely contain details worthy of deeper interpretation or sustained discussion, people still stop by.

This phenomenon ties closely to the lifestyles of China’s urban middle class. Today, visiting shopping centers is rarely about direct buying. It is more about occupying space—settling into a café, restaurant, or lounge, and staying there. Experiencing these high-end places without big expenses is now common. Whether the broader economy expands or contracts, low-cost dignity remains attractive.

A “fun and free” exhibition in a commercial space perfectly justifies participation: it allows for non-routine movement, and its primary value is creating shareable social media content. Posting a few photos helps visitors present themselves as living a “rich and varied life.” The combination of crowds and repeated content reinforces itself, forming a cycle. Thus, “visiting an exhibition” shifts from being an aesthetic experience to being a repeatable, shareable social act.

People are drawn in. A cycle gradually forms. They take photos, post them, and these posts are continuously replicated on the platform. This replicability, in turn, reinforces the motivation to visit in person. In the end, "visiting an exhibition" seems less about seeing something and more about repeating an action. You may not remember the details, but you know this can be done again.

First Modern Department Store Le Bon Marché

To understand the logic of “curated retail” in contemporary China, one must look to an earlier model of modern consumer space. Nineteenth-century Parisian department store Le Bon Marché is a key example. It is widely seen as a starting point for modern commercial spaces and for the blend of commerce and art.

Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Aristide Boucicaut and his wife Marguerite, Le Bon Marché grew alongside rapid middle-class expansion during the Industrial Revolution. Earlier retail models mainly served elites. Le Bon Marché addressed an urban, middle-class public eager to enter consumer society. Goods were no longer just functional items. They began to take on meanings related to identity, desire, and modern life.

At both spatial and institutional levels, Le Bon Marché introduced innovations¹ that still feel strikingly contemporary. For example, fixed pricing made costs transparent² and changed the information asymmetry that had favored sellers. Additionally, new architectural techniques—iron frameworks and large-scale atriums—created open interiors that encouraged movement and wandering. Moreover, the inclusion of rest areas and social spaces also extended visitors’ stay, making “lingering” part of the consumption process.

More importantly, the department store built an early connection between commerce and cultural production. It used seasonal decorations, central displays, and musical events to create an atmosphere and attract visitors. It also featured exhibition spaces for artists excluded from official venues such as the Salon.

This gesture is hard to categorize. It can be seen as cultural patronage and as an early curatorial practice. Here, art no longer existed apart from commerce; instead, it became part of the broader narrative of the consumer environment.

Screenshots from Le Bon Marché's official website.

Le Bon Marché represents not only an innovation in retail but also an early form of what might be called a mechanism for producing experience. Through spatial design, visual display, and art exhibitions, it transformed shopping into a coherent, perceptible, and memorable experience. This resonates with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the Parisian arcades, where modern consumption spaces are understood not simply as sites of transaction, but as composite environments of viewing, wandering, and the projection of desire.

Contemporary “curated retail” in China appears less as a completely new phenomenon than as a reconfiguration of this historical trajectory. What distinguishes the present moment is the integration of digital media and social platforms, through which the production of experience is no longer confined to the physical site, but becomes simultaneously recorded, circulated, and replicated at a much higher frequency.

The Rise of “Curated Retail” in China

If we widen the lens slightly and look over a longer historical span, the development of commercial space in China follows a relatively clear trajectory. The architectural firm Arcadis³ has outlined this evolution in spatial terms: from the marketplace scenes depicted in Along the River During the Qingming Festival, to the introduction of Western-style department stores in the late nineteenth century; from the state-owned retail system of the 1950s to the 1980s, to the gradual transition toward market-oriented commercial groups after the Reform and Opening-up period⁴; and eventually to the twenty-first-century model of the “commercial complex”—a hybrid urban structure combining retail, office space, dining, and entertainment.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, however, the disruption to physical retail has accelerated yet another shift. A consumption-centered logic is no longer sufficient. What emerges instead is a model of space that must provide reasons for people to visit. As Deloitte suggests in its report The Future of The Mall, shopping centers are increasingly expected to function as destinations—not only sites of consumption, but also spaces for social interaction, cultural engagement, and experiential activities.

So-called ‘curated retail’ has become a frequently invoked concept. It attempts to integrate public-facing art display with conventional retail, transforming commercial space into something that is not only transactional but also designed and narrativized as an experience. If K11 MUSEA can be seen as an early example of this model in a Chinese context, its significance lies not simply in bringing art into the mall, but in redefining the relationship between the two. Art is no longer supplementary; it becomes part of the spatial narrative itself, even a primary mechanism for attracting visitors.

As this model expands across mainland China, it begins to take on more differentiated forms. One trajectory can be described as a kind of “curated retail” led by large-scale commercial complexes. Developments such as the MixC series by China Resources are typically located in the urban cores of first-tier and second-tier cities and positioned around a “high-end lifestyle.” Here, art most often appears in the form of large-scale installations staged around holidays or recurring cycles—ranging from traditional festive imagery to popular IP characters, and more recently to themes such as sustainability or lifestyle branding. These installations are usually placed in high-traffic areas, such as atriums or entrances, and are tightly integrated with circulation routes.

The “exhibition” functions both as content and as medium. Visitors, even without any intention to shop, can participate through a simple sequence of viewing, photographing, and posting. Once these images circulate through keyword searches and social media feeds, they begin to generate further visibility and draw new visitors. In this sense, these commercial spaces do resemble a contemporary version of the arcade: a mechanism that, in the wake of e-commerce and the pandemic, brings people back into physical space. What it produces, above all, is a visible sense of “prosperity”—regardless of whether that prosperity corresponds to actual consumption.

A second trajectory is closer to brand-driven curated retail, resembling the pop-up shops that emerged in the 1990s, yet also distinct from them. A notable example is Gentle Monster, which has rapidly expanded across Asia and beyond. Its retail environments resemble continuously evolving installation sites rather than conventional stores. Instead of relying on familiar luxury-brand narratives, it constructs highly visual, sometimes slightly alienating spaces that hover between futurity and estrangement.

I have always felt that Gentle Monster is a case worth taking seriously. Its avant-garde quality is not only formal, but also affective. There is something like a quasi–posthuman aesthetic at work—a different mode of perception. In these spaces, the product is no longer the sole focus, perhaps not even the primary one. People are drawn in not simply to buy, but to momentarily enter a perceptual state that feels distinct from everyday life. Perhaps this is precisely why it resonates so widely. What it offers is not just commodities, but the suggestion of another way of living.

Gentle Monster in Shenzhen, image from the official website of Haus Nowhere Shenzhen.

This phenomenon is not limited to China. In recent years, similar forms of “curated retail” have appeared across Asian cities, including Emsphere in Bangkok, Spiral in Tokyo, and a range of hybrid exhibition-retail spaces in South Korea. What emerges is a regional pattern: a blurred zone between art and commerce that is becoming increasingly visible.

Whether labeled “curated retail” or pop-up retail, these practices consistently operate within this in-between space. They differ from traditional high art, and they do not necessarily carry explicit political or critical agendas. Yet it is precisely this ambiguity that makes them compelling as a cultural phenomenon. People are willing to look, to participate, and to circulate these experiences.

As for what exactly draws them in, whether it is the performance of self on social media, an aspiration toward a certain kind of well-lived life, or simply an unarticulated impulse, there may not be a clear answer. Perhaps people are not particularly concerned with art, nor with whether they are being folded into the logic of capital. They simply move within this system, trying, in one way or another, to make life feel a little more vivid.

The Experience Economy — Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung

If we place what we have been calling “curated retail” within a broader framework, it quite naturally falls under the experience economy. As Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argue, experience itself has become a form of economic offering—something that can be deliberately designed, produced, and sold, no less significant than goods or services.⁵ Thus, before generating any form of economic return, companies must first produce an experience that consumers recognize as “worthwhile.”⁶ Regardless of cost, this prior production of experience is essential: only when affect is successfully activated can it be translated into capital.

The experience happens before the purchase. In fact, everything is already arranged. The space, the lighting, the circulation, the installations, the rhythm—where you are supposed to pause, where you might take a photo, where you begin to feel that something is quite nice—all of this has already been written into the script of the experience. So when we walk into these spaces, it becomes difficult to say whether what we feel is spontaneous or gently guided. And yet, this does not necessarily feel uncomfortable. Most of the time, it feels “worth it.” Still, there is sometimes a faint sense of emptiness that is hard to articulate. As if everything works, but only up to a point.

It is here that Walter Benjamin’s distinction becomes useful. In his reading of Charles Baudelaire, he differentiates between two forms of experience that are often conflated but fundamentally distinct: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Etymologically, Erfahrung is “to travel”, which means a journey or a passage. It refers to an accumulative, continuous structure of experience—something that unfolds over time, is absorbed and transformed, and can be carried forward. Erlebnis is “to live”; by contrast, it is immediate and situational. It is bound to a specific moment, emphasizing sensory intensity and impact. In this sense, one might say that Erlebnis is tied to moments of sensation, whereas Erfahrung forms a more continuous and durable texture of experience. Compared to the extended, accumulative process of Erfahrung, it operates within a much narrower experiential frame—one that is, consequently, more susceptible to design, manipulation, and commodification.⁷

Bobby Seal, Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Birth of the Flâneur:

Erlebnis can be characterized as the shock-induced anesthesia brought about by the overwhelming sensory bombardment of life in a modern city, somewhat akin to the alienated subjectivity experienced by a worker bound to his regime of labor. Erfahrung is a more positive response and refers to the mobility, wandering, or cruising of the flâneur; the unmediated experience of the wealth of sights, sounds, and smells the city offers.⁸

Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics:

The continuum of Erfahrung had already been broken by the unassimilable shocks of urban life, and the replacement of artisanal production by the dull, non-cumulative repetition of the assembly line. Meaningful narrative had been supplanted by haphazard information and raw sensation in the mass media. As Martin Jay suggests, the continuity of experience has been fragmented—interrupted by information, by speed, by the constant influx of stimuli. And as Bobby Seal puts it more bluntly, this condition produces a kind of numbness formed through excessive shock.

What these so-called exhibitions seem to produce, over and over again, are forms of Erlebnis. They are visually appealing, easy to enter, and quick to complete. You walk through, look around, take a few photos, post them, and in a sense, the experience is already over, sometimes even before you leave. They do not demand much interpretation, nor do they leave much behind that calls for further reflection. Instead, they operate within a carefully calibrated threshold: just interesting enough, just simple enough, just worth recording. Perhaps this is precisely why they are so compatible with social media. It is not that they are worth sharing; rather, they are structured from the outset to be shareable. At times, it feels less like we are experiencing a space and more like we are moving through a preconfigured state of circulation.

Thomas Elsaesser proposed a possible connection between cinematic experience and the theme park, while the latter is often understood as a paradigmatic form of the experience economy.⁹ This idea is quite suggestive: the experience economy seems to share a similar structure with cinema. Perhaps contemporary commercial spaces go one step further. They are like cinema and theme parks, but more importantly, they are all producing a certain kind of experience structure, one meant to be consumed. A more radical thought would be this: what we usually describe as shock, fatigue, even trauma in modern subjectivity might itself be turning into a kind of “solution.” In this sense, it could be understood as a form of Erlebnis without Erfahrung.

Trauma, then, becomes part of the experience economy! Trauma becomes a solution!

The question is whether there exists a “right” or “successful” mode of experience. The carefully designed narratives, simulated environments, and performed identities offered by the experience economy all unfold within a bounded, controlled, limited, known-in-advance, and safe space. It feels complete, but does not accumulate; intense, but does not last. And when we enter these spaces, we are, in fact, aware of this. We know they are temporary and that nothing will really be changed. But this does not stop us from stepping in, taking a look, taking a few photos, and leaving with a vague sense of satisfaction.

Within such a mechanism, numbness and stimulation almost become optional. You can enter and exit; everything happens within a controlled range. Perhaps this is where the subtle contradiction of contemporary commercial space lies: on the one hand, people become increasingly numb to continuous sensory stimulation; on the other, they keep seeking new experiences, as if to maintain the feeling that life is still happening. If so, then perhaps these experiences do offer a certain kind of consolation. But if it is consolation, it is very limited.

**Chinese Arcades — Flâneur, or the One Being Watched?**

It sometimes feels as if the arcades described by Walter Benjamin were never really completed. Or rather, they have always been in the process of becoming—never fixed, never finished. In twenty-first-century China, one possible form might be what we now call “curated retail.” If the Parisian flâneurof the nineteenth century inhabited a certain mode of idle life, then people in contemporary China seem to be searching, in their own way, for something like a lifestyle as well.

Looking at Chinese cities today, those shopping centers described as “curated retail” can be seen as one continuation of this form. They are similarly enclosed yet walkable spaces. They invite wandering, lingering, and looking. And like the arcades, they assemble commodities, displays, and visual stimuli into a continuous sensory environment. Only the form has changed, and so has the rhythm.

The nineteenth-century flâneur moved within a relatively loose sense of time. He wandered between streets and arcades, without urgency, without needing to justify his presence. This condition of “having nothing to do” was, at times, understood as a quiet refusal of the modern regime of labor—a mild form of resistance. But Benjamin already reminded us that this figure was never so simple. He writes that the flâneur is “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers.¹⁰ If we place this line in the present, it produces an unsettling sense of overlap. A seemingly harmless activity is quietly reinserted into a structure of power.

As “citywalk,”¹¹ visiting exhibitions, or going to the mall are increasingly framed as lifestyle choices, it becomes easy to believe that we are the ones deciding how to spend our time—that we can simply “look without buying,” carefully avoiding the trap of consumerism. But perhaps the question is not whether we consume, but whether we are already participating in something else.

The moment we raise our phones, take a photograph, and post it on social media, a form of possession has already taken place. As Lauren Berlant suggests, “an object is only ours when we have it, when it is used by us.”¹² People still engage in actions to verify ownership—capturing photographs or videos and sharing them on social media —to confirm that an experience belongs to them: I was there. I experienced this. I own this moment. Yet this sense of ownership increasingly depends on being seen by others.

A subtle shift occurs. We are no longer only wandering through space; we are also moving within a structure of visibility, organized by algorithms. We look at shop windows, installations, and other people, but at the same time, we are already imagining how we ourselves will appear.

If the shop window is imagined as a boundary between inside and outside, those standing outside tend to assume that they are the ones who look, while those inside are doing everything they can to draw that gaze toward the glass. To do so, they need to know what people are drawn to, so that they can decide what to display; and what is displayed, in turn, must convince people that what they see is somehow worth encountering, even fortunate to come across. What can be experienced in other cities must also be made available here. What you choose must be a worthy experience that one can access without ever really traveling. Thus, social media becomes a particularly convenient tool for curatorial teams. It is not only what we usually take it to be—a platform for promotion—but also a source of information, from which one can directly observe, through a large number of posts, which shop windows are already surrounded by crowds.

The idea of being “a spy for capital” might be understood differently. It is not simply that we observe on behalf of capital, but that we gradually hand over our perception, our movement, and our images. We think we are just passing through. But in fact, we leave quite a lot behind.

If we return to the question of experience, this condition seems to resonate with what was described earlier as Erlebnis without Erfahrung. We enter spaces, record moments, and circulate them, but rarely carry anything away. Experience does not accumulate; it disperses, externalized into images that can be searched and browsed.

What once belonged to the flâneur as a form of sensory experience now becomes something that needs to be verified—it must be seen in order to exist. And if the senses themselves become a mode of possession, as Berlant suggests, then their liberation becomes even more difficult. It becomes harder to tell whether we are sensing the world or producing sensations that can be exchanged. Is there, then, any possibility of escape? Perhaps it is difficult to say. The false prosperity is not unique to this moment. Every historical period seems to have approached it, in one way or another, through its own forms of imagination.

There is a passage in The Arcades Project that always feels both gentle and sad:

In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history-that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society, as stored in the unconscious of the collective, never come to rest on the threshold of the most ancient cultures, but take up elements of natural history into their movement. This movement, in combination with what is new, engenders the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions.¹³ It is precisely within these constantly renewed spaces—from arcades to shopping malls, from shop windows to social media—that this unfinished imagination continues, in one way or another.

Only now has it become increasingly difficult to tell whether it still belongs to experience or merely to a feeling produced. By the time I finish this piece, I look out the window and realize that spring is here. Another spring. Certainly, “naturally [Pun],”¹⁴ that is never quite enough. The malls are already ready for “spring.” I return to the search bar and type in “mall,” “spring,” “exhibition.” The glowing, warm crystal spheres are gone, and so is the dense, festive red of the New Year. In their place are lively, vibrant, and verdant greens, and soft, romantic cherry blossoms. The malls are sending their invitations: come to wander within a meticulously crafted spring! Yes, people do experience the season in nature. But at times, they might need something a little more intense.

Parc Central 2026 Spring, The MixC Qianhai 2026 Breeze, Shenzhen Bay MixC 2026 Eteecy, Fuzhou The MixC 2026 Spring, Wuhan The MixC 2025 Spring & Fuzhou The MixC 2025 Spring, images from publicly available posts on RedNote.

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Xiaoqian (Chelsea) Zhong worked as a freelance curator for a creative studio that develops digital art campaigns for large-scale commercial real estate in China. She is doing a cultural analysis master at the University of Amsterdam and as part of her studies is doing an internship at INC, early 2026.

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Endless Arcades: Curated Retail and the Experience of Numbness in China

First Modern Department Store Le Bon Marché

The Rise of “Curated Retail” in China

The Experience Economy — Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung

**Chinese Arcades — Flâneur, or the One Being Watched?**

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