Crybaby in Beijing: Consumers embrace whimsy

What happened Pop Mart has given Crybaby its largest exhibition yet, and visitors are supplying much of the promotion. “Crybaby Letting Go & Holding on” opened August 1 at Central Station in Beijing’s Langyuan Station complex and runs through September 5. Timed-entry tickets are sold across nine sessions a day, sending visitors shoeless into a set of linked ball pits and past oversized figures of the crying doll. Beijing’s edition runs to about 5,000 sqm, according to Pop Mart, making it the largest Crybaby exhibition staged anywhere. How the Shanghai Crybaby exhibition set the template Shanghai got the first one. “Crybaby Tears & Courage” opened at Gate M West Bund Dream Center on December 20, 2025 and closed January 25, filling close to 2,000 sqm across four floors — at that point the character’s largest showing globally, and its first major exhibition in China. A smaller Beijing outing followed at Indigo mall between June 12 and August 2 this year, built around a summer beach theme. Langyuan carries over the Shanghai cast of Crybaby, Crybunny and Cryteddy, and adds a set of characters Pop Mart calls Crybaby’s “star friends,” appearing in public for the first time. Weekend visitors can meet them on site. “Letting Go & Holding On” is the stated theme, and the route through the space is built as an emotional arc: visitors fall, sit in it, then get back up. Pop Mart uses the characters’ tear-streaked design to hold both halves of that at once, the release of pain against the keeping of hope. Emotion-coded tear pools and trampolines Attention has concentrated on the tear pools. Three ball pits, in brown, yellow and pink, connect to one another beneath an inflatable membrane, with trampolines, slides and climbing tunnels set among them. Each color corresponds to a different emotion — gentle protection, heartfelt courage and carefree freedom. Visitors leave their shoes at the entrance and get in. The format is designed to be documented. On Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote), visitors post outfit guides, photography tips and maps marking the strongest camera angles, turning the exhibition into a set of instructions for producing content inside it. The “crybabyexhibition” tag has drawn 23,700 views. Broader main-character-energy tags on the platform run into the hundreds of millions, a scale that speaks to the appetite for staged self-portraiture in China rather than to this show specifically. What that gives Pop Mart is distribution it does not buy. Once visitors document their own visit, every outfit post and camera-angle guide carries the exhibition and the character further, and the company's advertising spend stops being the limiting factor on reach. Pop Mart exhibitions go global Exhibitions have become a standing format for Pop Mart, not a one-off for Crybaby. The “Monsters 10th Anniversary World Tour,” co-curated with How2work, has run from Shanghai to Taipei, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo and New York, where it opened in July as the first US stop. Its Paris leg, the only European date, took over the Hôtel du Grand Veneur in the Marais for most of March and gave over six zones to Kasing Lung’s original manuscripts, oil paintings and figures. Hirono has had its own outing. Pop Mart opened a Covent Garden pop-up and exhibition space for the character in May 2025, designed with its creator Lang and billed as the company’s first Hirono site in Europe. Singapore, meanwhile, hosts the Pop Toy Show each August at Marina Bay Sands — the only edition of the convention staged outside China, and is contracted to stay there through 2027. The Jing Take Pop Mart’s Labubu year in 2025 established how far consumer appetite for joy-led buying could stretch. The Beijing company has built a global business on cute collectible characters, opened Pop Land inside Chaoyang Park in September 2023, and expanded it again this April with three new zones and its first large rides. Founder Wang Ning has said publicly that he wants the company to become China’s Disney. Crybaby demonstrates what a built-out character world can do. Visitors travel to exhibitions and pop-ups partly to make social content there, drawn by a character that photographs well and a setting engineered for sharing. That points to the durability of the kidult economy, where adults spend on collectibles, characters and experiences that reconnect them to childhood while offering new material for self-presentation. Why authorship matters The character suits that market unusually well. Thai artist Molly Yllom created Crybaby in 2017 after losing her golden retriever, and its identity sits on emotions people usually manage or hide. Pop Mart signed her and began releasing the series in 2020; both this exhibition and the Shanghai one were co-presented with her studio, Molly Factory, with Molly leading the spatial concept design herself. That authorship matters commercially — it is the artist-partnership model the company has used to build most of its portfolio, rather than an IP developed in-house. Collaborations have carried the character past toys. SK-II wrapped its Facial Treatment Essence in Crybaby packaging this July across Asian markets, under a campaign about being unguarded. Samsung came earlier, in 2024, pairing the character with the Galaxy Z Flip6 in a Thailand-first gift box that Pop Mart described as its first successful overseas licensing deal. Crocs got there before either, in 2023. The Powerpuff Girls tie-up was Crybaby's first cross-brand series — 12 figures plus a secret edition, and six vinyl-face plush plus a hidden one. Whimsy on TikTok and Xiaohongshu Outside China the direction is the same. Adult Lego sets sell to adults; plush charms hang off designer handbags; childlike whimsy has become a mainstream consumer aesthetic rather than a children’s one. Social platforms have pushed that along. Whimsy content circulates widely on TikTok as a lifestyle prescription, and in May the “New York Times” ran a piece by Brian Josephs arguing the trend may serve as a life raft for zillennials — small retrievable pleasures against a punishing news cycle. Platform tallies give a rough sense of scale: more than 542,000 TikTok posts tagged #whimsy, about 145,600 Xiaohongshu posts under the same term and roughly 3 million tagged #whimsical. Whimsy, as the word is now used, describes lighthearted spontaneity and self-expression, often routed through objects that are deliberately cute, excessive or impractical. Pop Mart’s entire business converts character design into exactly that — collectibles, experiences and social currency — which is why a company built on small plastic figures can fill 5,000 sqm with ball pits and call it an exhibition.

Crybaby in Beijing: Consumers embrace whimsy

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Crybaby in Beijing: Consumers embrace whimsy

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag