Office workers in Shenzhen's Xiasha district have grown accustomed to the visual assault of massive posters greeting them daily: stepping out of the subway-connected passageway into China Resources Bay Mall, they're immediately surrounded by various posters and life-size standees, treating them to "handsome men and beautiful women before work every day."
Giant screen posters in the atrium, digital displays in elevator lobbies, floating banners, Q-shaped mascots, and derivative merchandise transform the entire mall into a massive promotional showcase for idols. From domestic entertainment to K-pop superstars, and from gaming to anime's two-dimensional characters, anyone could become the protagonist of this grand spectacle.
During the recent Qixi Festival, Qi Yu, the protagonist from the otome game "Love and Deepspace," took over all the major electronic screens at Shenzhen's China Resources Bay Mall, attracting massive fan interaction. Some passersby mimicked fans taking photos, capturing both the stunning indoor decorations and outdoor large screens while sending voice messages to friends, puzzledly asking: "What happened to this mall? Did they replace all the DIOR and Hermès ads with paper characters?"
No, no, no – these aren't brand advertisements by the mall. The proper term for this phenomenon is "painful building" or "痛楼."
In recent years, amid the mutual attraction between fan support culture and malls' thirst for foot traffic, "painful buildings" have become a fresh experiment for shopping centers and commercial complexes.
Just how strong is fans' purchasing power? Can painful buildings become salvation for offline malls?
**Painful Buildings: An Immersive Star-Chasing Experience**
What exactly is a painful building? To answer this question, we need to trace back to the birthplace of two-dimensional subculture – Japan.
In Japan, a society that values order and maintaining proper distance, the two-dimensional community chose the Japanese term "痛々しい (ita-ita-shii)" to express the embarrassment and shame of overly displaying one's preferences externally.
"Painful bags" are the most famous derivative of "painful culture." Fans fill the transparent pockets on the outside of their bags with beloved badges and figurines, creating a strong visual impact. Subsequently, "painful culture" gradually extended from bags to other areas, essentially expressing one's hobbies through extreme or even exaggerated means.
While painful culture originated in Japan, the true birthplace of painful buildings is China. Since the beginning of this year, major first-tier cities nationwide have successively launched painful buildings with different themes. Shenzhen's China Resources Bay and CITIC Plaza have even been jokingly called "painful building specialists," hosting painful building productions almost every month.
On China Resources Bay's official social media, besides the frequently appearing Qi Yu painful buildings, other themed activities have featured Korean boy band members G-Dragon, Quan Wooyoung, and Kim Doyoung, Japan's enduring robot IP "Gundam," popular domestic anime IP "Bad Guys," and top male star Cheng Yi.
These are typically collaborations between fan groups and malls, though some malls now organize painful building activities based on trending topics.
Most fans don't have strong ulterior motives for doing this – they simply want to do something for their idol through the painful building opportunity. In an interview, one fan said, "They've already provided me with so much emotional value, and the painful building is my way of giving back my love."
From February 14-28 this year, during Valentine's Day, a fan spent 600,000 yuan to create a Qi Yu-themed "painful building" at Shenzhen's China Resources Bay. The installation featured 11 large screens on rotation, giant glass stickers at the main entrance, and escalator banners, allowing fans immersive interaction.
Unlike traditional two-dimensional culture, painful buildings are more like offline fan gatherings and celebrations. "Whether they're otome game players, two-dimensional IP audiences, or celebrity fans, they can all create painful buildings for their idols," says CC.
CC is a fan of a popular male actor with both traffic appeal and acting skills, and she's also a designer who personally handled the design for some of her idol's birthday support painful buildings in the first half of this year.
In her view, compared to the continuation of merchandise economy trends, painful buildings are more like variants of "birthday cafes." Birthday cafes involve financially capable fans renting out entire coffee shops on their idol's birthday, where other fans can enter for free based on their social media levels, game levels, or spending history.
"The biggest difference between painful buildings and birthday cafés is that painful buildings' audience isn't limited to fans," CC explains.
If birthday cafés are internal celebrations within fan communities, then painful buildings are grander parties where even passing pedestrians can become part of the gathering.
Another significant difference is that birthday cafés typically last only 1-2 days, while IP painful buildings generally run for weeks or even months. CC notes this relates to the collaborating parties, activity investment, and event nature.
Birthday café organizers are usually private coffee shops with limited reach, and themes are generally confined to "celebrating the idol's birthday," lacking external appeal. Even if fans could afford long-term bookings, café owners wouldn't want their customer flow limited to fans only.
Painful buildings typically require coordination with mall operations teams. Whether it's floor decals, banners, guides, or life-size standees, all installations require considerable time to complete. "If you hang them for two days then take them down, the cost really doesn't make sense," another interviewee noted.
How much does a painful building actually cost? Opinions vary widely, from small five-figure sums to hundreds of thousands. Some are funded by fan groups, while others are shouldered entirely by super-spending fans, like the game player who spent 600,000 yuan on the Qi Yu-themed painful building, earning gratitude from numerous fans on social media.
Since painful buildings aren't public tender businesses, they're influenced by multiple factors including star popularity, mall surroundings, mall positioning, and operations teams. Therefore, even painful buildings with the same duration and support intensity might receive completely different responses from different fan organizations.
"If fans happen to know the operations team leader, they might get cost price," reveals Xiao Wang, a department store industry insider.
**Can't Save Malls, But Can Revive Popularity**
Many believe that in today's sluggish physical retail environment, commercial complexes can earn substantial venue fees from hosting painful building activities – including some commercial real estate professionals. This might be because they haven't actually organized painful buildings.
From actual observation, venue fees aren't the decisive factor making malls willing to host painful buildings. "Painful buildings" are more treated as a painless traffic-driving method.
Today's physical commercial real estate most lacks popularity. Xiao Mi, a commercial real estate professional from Hangzhou, believes the hardest thing for current physical retail isn't "bringing prices down," but generating foot traffic. People are the first step to transactions. If consumers don't visit malls, how can there be conversions?
Commercial real estate mainly profits from shop leasing and sales, with shop rentals being the major revenue source. Only by ensuring stable customer flow can commercial real estate maintain healthy operations.
However, current commercial real estate challenges are evident in real estate companies' financial reports. High-end player Hang Lung Group's mid-year report released July 30 showed property leasing revenue down 3% year-over-year, with mainland segments down 2%.
Among Hang Lung's mainland malls, new first-tier cities saw the most severe rental income declines. As of June 30, Wuhan Hang Lung Plaza mall revenue decreased 36% year-over-year. Shenyang Forum 66 in Northeast China fared worse, down 37% year-over-year.
Understanding this logic makes it easy to see why commercial real estate professionals constantly worry about traffic, and why so many shopping centers are opening their arms to painful buildings.
After all, they can collect certain venue operation fees while attracting customer flow – whether two-dimensional groups or star-chasers – who have longer consumption cycles and certain spending power.
This reflects the growth of two-dimensional audiences and continued expansion of related industry scale. In 2022, Frost & Sullivan's "China's Two-Dimensional Content Industry White Paper" showed that from 2016-2021, pan-two-dimensional users had an annual compound growth rate of 10.4%. The two-dimensional content industry is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan by 2026, becoming Generation Z's common popular culture.
Ming Yi, a mall operations professional from Hangzhou, strongly agrees with the white paper's viewpoints. In her view, for the two-dimensional industry to truly break into mainstream, it definitely needs increased general-purpose consumers.
"Core audiences participate in subculture production while also being subculture consumers, and can even be key drivers pushing subculture toward mass markets."
But without casual interest (describing those with favorable feelings but not devoted fans), subculture can never reach the masses, let alone achieve commercialization possibilities.
The integration of commercial real estate with subculture and two-dimensional culture has a long history. Shanghai's Jing'an Joy City, as a leader in this area, created the Generation Z-targeted two-dimensional district "Hachijima i-LAND" in 2017, accumulating rich IP collaboration experience.
In painful building experiments, not only art-focused malls like Shenzhen's China Resources Bay, but also mid-to-high-end shopping malls like Shanghai Global Harbor have begun taking action.
This isn't just because "painful buildings" can gather popularity, but also because combined operational strategies might bring incremental effects.
During some malls' painful building periods, fans spontaneously share check-in videos or photos on social platforms, bringing brand promotion reach to malls. Current operations content on platforms like Xiaohongshu and official social media from malls like China Resources Bay integrates with painful buildings, such as guiding fan material collection, accurate photo location finding, and even new check-in spots on Xiaohongshu.
On official social media, Qi Yu painful building promotional content also connects with mall dining and beauty benefit activities.
During painful building periods, fan clubs organize various activities lasting 4-6 hours, and after fans participate in check-in interactions and flash dances in malls, they need restaurants and tea shops to replenish energy, bringing certain sales conversion possibilities.
**Malls Experience "Pain" Afterward**
However, not all commercial complexes are suitable for painful buildings. Generally, commercial complexes can be divided into Shopping Malls and Department Stores, with different commercial complexes having different ecological positioning.
For traditional department stores' vertical audiences, discounts and sales are more attractive than gathering popularity. "They have clear consumption goals, and if prices are right, transactions are easily made," supplements department store industry professional Xiao Wang.
In comparison, Shopping Malls generally don't pick consumers – from B1 underground food courts to high-floor luxury brands, as long as you're willing to enter the mall doors, shopping centers are willing to do business with you, making them more likely to form positive interactions with painful buildings.
In Ming Yi's view, as products of IP economy, painful buildings' life cycles might be significantly shorter than other themed activities. The reason is simple: current painful building activities are mostly organized by fan support associations, including "compliant" organizations like Cai Xukun's fan club that obtained blue V verification (since 2021, fan clubs wanting blue V certification on Weibo need to sign corresponding contracts with celebrity management companies), but more are activities organized by individual fans.
This involves many copyright authorization issues and potentially large copyright risks. Additionally, not all malls understand the full IP collaboration process.
As CC said, painful buildings are essentially fan gathering support activities, just with more onlookers around. The number of onlookers depends on multiple factors including surrounding foot traffic, IP core audiences, and support activities. Flash dances and small gift distribution might gather many spectators, but undeniably, painful buildings remain celebrations within small circles.
Some malls have concerns about doing "painful buildings." Compared to traditional two-dimensional business "merchandise economy," painful building traffic seems fleeting. "It feels like only one-time business," Xiao Wang says.
The popularity of painful buildings partly reflects that in current commercial real estate operations, experiential feel is the primary principle. But trending experiences come fast and might go fast too.
When asked whether painful buildings could become new pathways for commercial real estate to attract foot traffic, Ming Yi asked back, "Hasn't this trend already passed?"
In Ming Yi's observation, the industry's current hotter themed activities have shifted to fan meetings, "like rap culture."
Ming Yi has over 10 years of first-tier city commercial complex operations experience. In her view, fan support-focused painful building activities ultimately cannot and should not become mainstream ways for commercial complexes to embrace young people.
Besides the copyright legal issues mentioned above, another major reason is that not all commercial complexes want to attract young people.
In another industry insider's view, good mall operations need to be built on clear positioning: Is it a 20,000 or 80,000 square meter commercial complex? Does it mainly serve surrounding communities or serve nationwide from a local base? Is it standardized or non-standard retail?
Blindly pleasing young people represents both lack of confidence in mall operations itself and disrespect for young people, because this precisely shows they don't understand young people.
Painful buildings might not be commercial real estate's panacea, but they do remind us: offline space value is shifting from "transaction venues" to "experience venues."
Future malls need to not only sell goods, but also learn to "create dreams."