So why are malls so popular?

One reason is convenience. In a city marred by traffic jams, a public transport system that’s not fully integrated, and few sheltered pavements or cycling paths, malls make daily life easier. Many are built close to or connected to train stations and come with several floors of parking for those who drive. If you need to visit the bank, grab groceries, have a meal, or watch a movie, malls provide a one-stop destination without getting stuck in traffic moving between places. There’s also the year-round heat and humidity, which makes malls an easy refuge.

The challenge is they all look the same. Same layouts, same brands, same offerings. There’s little to distinguish one from another. Remove the names and logos, and most look as though they were designed and built by the same company. Some try to make things more interesting with indoor gardens, sky views, water fountains, or scattered art sculptures, but they still feel like four walls and a ceiling with a basement.

That curiosity led me to visit Korea, Japan, and China to understand what else was possible. In Chengdu, I found the closest example of what people had described in our interviews, the kind of place they imagined and would have loved.

Opened in April 2015 (ten years ago!), Taikoo Li Chengdu takes a different approach to what a mall can be. Instead of tearing down the surrounding heritage buildings, the developer designed the site around them and restored the Sichuan-style architecture. It also integrates the historic Daci Temple into the development, giving it a strong sense of place.

Built around an open-lane, low-rise design, the pedestrian-friendly lanes connect boutiques, restaurants, tea shops, a cinema, and supermarket, with a direct link to the metro, making it feel more like part of the city than a mall.

Unlike a typical mall, there are no single entry or exit points, nor escalators that make you follow a set path around each floor. Most malls are designed like supermarkets, where essentials like milk are placed at the very back so you’re made to walk past everything else first. Taikoo Li Chengdu flips that logic. Its open-lane layout and multiple access points let you enter from different streets and wander freely without feeling trapped. The low-rise blocks and outdoor walkways make it easy to slip in for one thing and actually leave with just that, without being held hostage by four walls and a ceiling.

Maybe that’s why Taikoo Li doesn’t seem like a mall at all. It feels like part of the city, a place to pass through, linger, or get lost without being told what to do. And if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed across generations, it’s that young people don’t like being told what to do.

*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 12 Sep 2025.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

Vessels?

A vessel is a container. A glass, a bowl, a mug, a tupperware, and even that jar of peanut butter you stick your finger in when you thought no one was looking. Yes, that one. Vessels hold things before we need them. They come in all shapes and sizes.

But what I really mean by vessel is a container that gives things meaning. A museum turns an object into art. Move the same object to the street and suddenly we call it junk or vandalism. Same object. Different vessel. Completely different meaning. The art was never the point.

Bookstores are vessels. Without books, just a sad empty room with shelves and a lot of opinions. A cinema without films is just a room with expensive chairs. You get the idea.

Most of them, especially the ones we have been putting stuff into for the past few decades, have gotten a lot worse at their jobs.

Old Facebook was a clean simple bowl. Specific context, specific people, clear purpose. New Facebook is the same bowl after someone sat on it. Still technically a bowl. You open it and are genuinely unsure why.

Old Instagram was a narrow bowl with clean edges. Photos only. New Instagram is wider, flatter, more cluttered, and whatever else was added when someone got drunk on kombucha. The original bowl is technically still in there somewhere. Buried.

Old Twitter was a tall clean glass. Narrow, elegant, specific. A vessel that knew exactly what it was. New X has the walls bulging outward in every direction, twisted, barely recognisable. Same name. Completely different object. One previous owner.

Old YouTube was a round compact bowl. Videos you searched for on purpose, made by people who had no idea what they were doing yet. You came, you watched, you left. New YouTube got flattened and stretched sideways. The algorithm pushes whatever keeps you watching longest. Which, it turns out, is frequently things that are not true.

TikTok was never really a vessel. More like a funnel pointed at you. Started as teenagers dancing. Now it’s the internet inside the internet. Same funnel, just wider and significantly better aim. You don't choose what comes next. You just get waterboarded by content.

The vessels we’ve been putting stuff into for the past two decades grew in every direction except the right one. Wider base. More cluttered. Forgot what they were mostly for but kept the same name.

Or, said less elegantly, they just went to shit.

What Makes a Vessel Work

A well-designed vessel knows what it is for. More importantly, it knows what it is not for.

The vessels we used to love, now mostly gone or forgotten (like that old aunt you sent to a home and promised to visit but never did), they mostly existed for a single purpose. Nobody asked them to be more. They were fine being what they were.

Flickr for photos. Ffffound for discovery. Tumblr for micro blogs, quotes, memes, and whatever strange obsession you had and called a hobby. Each did one thing well. We had these. We loved these. Then the bigger things looked over, liked what they saw, and absorbed what made them special into everything else they were already doing. The originals became irrelevant.

A well-designed vessel doesn’t require you to perform or be publicly judged by strangers at all times. The like count, the follower number, the engagement rate, the weekly dashboard that arrives in your inbox to remind you how invisible you are (except to that old aunt still waiting in the home who watches and likes everything you post without fail, god bless her). These are design decisions, not facts of nature. Someone somewhere knew humans are wired to measure themselves against others and decided to make that addictive. One of the things actually tested hiding like counts. Engagement dropped. They brought them back. That tells you everything you need to know about whose interests the like count actually serves.

Think about your favourite mug. Now imagine it liked when you poured coffee in but withheld approval when you poured water. You would become very conscious about what you put into it. You would start performing for the mug. You would optimise for the mug. You would never again just make a cup of tea without first considering whether the mug would approve. You might even start making tea that tasted like coffee just to keep it happy. Eventually you would forget you ever liked tea in the first place.

That is what happened to the thing.

What Comes Next. Or Is Already Here.

Honestly, I have no idea.

Most likely not back to one thing that connects everyone and everything. That era is mostly over, except for some places where people still need to document every meal, every outfit, every moment of every holiday, and every minor life milestone to signal to their friends that they are someone. You know who you are.

What seems more likely is fragmentation. Smaller communities. Vessels built for specific people and interests rather than everyone and everything. Some of these vessels already exist. Most people have never heard of them. That is not a coincidence.

Private group chats. Small, closed, lidded. Just people who actually want to hear from you. The vessel that was working all along while everyone was busy complaining about the feed. The oldest new idea on this list.

Direct to audience. Substack, Ghost, or a simple mailing list. A direct line between one person making things and the people who chose to receive them. The subscription is the lid. You chose to be inside it. The only thing deciding who sees what is whether they wanted to.

Private collaborative spaces. A sealed vessel with a password for a lid. DFOS (Dark Forest Operating System) by Metalabel is built on a simple idea: the public internet has become so overrun that the only sensible move is to disappear into the trees in small groups with people you chose, without an audience. Which sounds less like a theory and more like a nice weekend.

Three categories. Three needs. Belonging. Making and sharing. Building together. Which is also, more or less, everything the broken vessels used to promise and stopped delivering.

Make Vessels, Not Content

Building a vessel is harder than filling one. Which is exactly why it is worth doing. AI can fill a vessel. It cannot build one. Yet.

It learns from what has already been made, already been said, already been asked. What it cannot do is start from nothing. From a hunch. From a feeling that something is wrong without knowing what yet. There is no dataset for that. The ability to think of new questions is still human territory. For now. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The work worth doing is not making more content for vessels that are already broken. It is building vessels that give the stuff we put in them meaning. Small ones. Focused ones. Ones that know exactly what they are not for.

( )

Many years ago, I was at the Muji flagship store in Ginza, Tokyo. On the top floor there was an exhibition built around a single incomplete sentence.

"Design is ( )."

That is it. The whole exhibition. A bracket, waiting to be filled by whoever stood in front of it. Simple idea. The kind of question that sounds too obvious to ask. And yet nobody had framed it quite that way before, which meant nobody had the answer either.

That is the whole point. The bracket is the vessel. Empty by design. The emptiness is not a problem to be solved. It is what makes it useful. Without the empty space, there is nothing to fill. Without the question, there is nothing to think about.

Rather than filling vessels, build them. It’s what turns a white wall into a gallery, a dark room into a cinema, and an empty room into somewhere worth being.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, I already have enormous respect for you. Please don’t feel obligated to subscribe, because it’ll be heartbreaking when you inevitably change your mind and unsubscribe. If you’d prefer this in shorter, less considered bursts with a significantly higher chance of me regretting posting things, I’m on Threads. And if after all of this you still want more, there’s a subscribe button somewhere on this page.

What the Poster Didn't Say

If you love books, actual paper ones, you may or may not know how the business works for small independent publishers. Here is the not so secret machinery. It is not pretty, but neither is most machinery.

Before a book even reaches a store, it has to be printed. Say it retails for $20. Printing might cost between $3 and $5 per copy at a run of 1,000, which is often the minimum before a printer is interested. And 1,000 copies is not a small number. Not if you are one of the many hopeful small publishers you see at book fairs.

Print fewer, say 300 or 500, and the unit cost jumps to $5 or even $10, depending on paper, binding, special finishes, and how ambitious you got at 2am when you were still convinced this was a good idea.

Printing alone takes around 30 percent of the retail price.

Now, back to our friendly neighbourhood store.

Bookstores take between 30 and 60 percent of retail, depending on the deal. On consignment, meaning the publisher places books in the store and only gets paid when they sell, the publisher gets maybe 60 to 70 percent of whatever comes in. If the store actually wants your book badly enough to buy it outright, which is rare for small publishers and they know it, they will pay roughly half the retail price. Sometimes even less.

Quick recap.
Stores take 30 to 60 percent.
Printing takes around 30 percent.

The publisher keeps about 10 percent. On a good day.

That is barely enough for a meal at McDonald's. Not even the “healthy” option.

But wait, there's more. As they used to say on TV.

Art Book Fairs

The night markets of the publishing world. Loud, sweaty, and suddenly everywhere.

Art book fairs started in Japan in 2009, then spread. In Asia alone there is now a circuit running from October to December, covering Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and more cities every year. Which either means the movement is genuinely growing or everyone is just looking for somewhere to put their boxes of unsold books.

For a few days in each city, small publishers rent a booth, dress it up with magazines, books, posters, and stickers (there are always stickers). For a weekend, at least, it feels like a community. Or as if they are in a band, on tour, except the tour is mostly book fairs and the rider is a foldable table.

The energy is good. I have been to enough of these to know that part is real.

Here is what is also real.

Booth fees run from $150 to $450. Some organisers take a cut of sales on top of that. Fair enough. Venues cost money, tables cost money, and someone with mostly good intentions spent most of the year securing the space, renting the furniture, and herding everyone into the same room at the same time. It is only fair that exhibitors cough up a few hundred dollars for the chance to meet other creators, potential readers, and people who will photograph their stickers but not buy anything. I have been there. I get it. It cannot be free.

But the books on those tables probably took most of the year to make too. And they will be visible to the public for exactly three days.

Three days out of 365. Then back into a storage room, or a studio corner, or wherever books wait when no one is looking at them. Not as an image on Instagram. As an actual object, sitting in the dark, hoping someone remembers it exists.

Here is the part nobody puts in the recap post.

Not everyone doing this has deep pockets or a large inheritance or an investment portfolio paying out dividends every month. The money to cover flights, accommodation, food, transport, booth fees, and the cost of shipping the books and the merch and the display materials to each city has to come from somewhere. And this is not one fair. It is a circuit. Multiple cities. Multiple tables. Multiple boxes that need to get there and, eventually, back.

A lot of money. A very small window. A lot of stickers that didn't sell.

Bookstores don't make it economically viable. Book fairs don't make it economically viable. And yet people keep making books, packing them into boxes, rolling suitcases through airports, setting up tables, and selling them one by one to strangers who spend four minutes deciding and then buy a tote bag instead.

So Now What

The obvious answer is buy direct from the author or publisher. Cut out the middlemen. Keep the money where it belongs. We say we want to support independent publishers, and buying direct is the best way to do it.

Good idea. Mostly unworkable.

I tried this recently. A small publisher in the US, a book I had been looking for and couldn't find anywhere locally, 300 pages, about half a kilo, $30. Reasonable. So I clicked add to cart, then the bright blue checkout button, typed in my name, email, mailing address, and waited.

The cart refreshed. Shipping to Singapore: $40.

That is the moment the brain switches modes. Not the part that loves books. The other part. The part that does math. And the math said: you are paying more to move the thing than the thing costs.

So, unless FedEx and DHL decide overnight to become nonprofits and offer free shipping to everyone, everywhere, out of the goodness of their hearts, which has roughly the same probability as a fast food chain switching to organic beef, it is not really a solution.

Bookstores stock what sells. Art book fairs exist for three days a year. Buying direct costs nearly double by the time the shipping calculator is done with you.

There is no clean answer here. The system works. Just not for the readers, the people who make them, or the books (who by the way are still in a box, in the dark, waiting).

New Library

There is a fourth option. Or at least there was.

A few years ago, we started working on something called New Library. A private library focused entirely on creative culture. Books, magazines, zines from independent publishers around the world, organised by country, covering art, design, fashion, food, architecture, photography. The kind of publications you see online but will probably never hold in your hands. The kind that never make it into bookstores because they don't move fast enough, and never make it to book fairs because you weren't in the right city on the right weekend. And even if you were, some of these books cost $50, $100, or more. When the average monthly salary of a young designer in Bangkok is around $500, owning one is not really a decision about taste. It is a decision about rent.

The idea was simple. Pay the price of a movie ticket. Get ninety minutes with some of the most interesting publications being made anywhere in the world. Not a co-working space. Not a cafe. Not a place to hang out. Just a library where reading is the whole point. A radical concept, apparently.

We would buy books from creators at full price. No consignment, no 40 to 60 percent cut, no waiting to see if it sells. They get paid. Visitors who find something they love get sent straight to buy directly from the publisher. The math, for once, works in the right direction.

Bangkok was where it was supposed to happen. A city full of people making things, most of whom have never been able to afford the books that might inspire them to make more. We presented the concept to a museum. They seemed genuinely interested. Then they ghosted us. Which, to be fair, is something of a national pastime.

A few months later, something that looked quite familiar opened its doors.

Maybe it was a coincidence. These things happen.

The books are still in boxes. In the dark. Patiently waiting. New Library is still an idea looking for a space. The museum that ghosted us is still open, presumably doing museum things.

Somewhere out there, a young designer is probably on Instagram, looking at a book they will never be able to afford, made by someone who keeps about 10 percent of what it sells for. That someone spent most of last year making it. They will spend this weekend at a book fair trying to sell it. They will sell a third of what they hoped and come home with more than they left with (mostly other people's stickers), because the very people who can least afford to buy books are the ones who most want to.

The book will go back in the box. The designer will keep scrolling.

The book exists. The reader exists. Nobody has figured out how to connect the two without taking most of the money.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, I already have enormous respect for you. Please don’t feel obligated to subscribe, because it’ll be heartbreaking when you inevitably change your mind and unsubscribe. If you’d prefer this in shorter, less considered bursts with a significantly higher chance of me regretting posting things, I’m on Threads. And if after all of this you still want more, there’s a subscribe button somewhere on this page.