ong Kong. Adrian Cheng, former CEO of Hong Kong-based New World Development, cannot be accused of lacking ambition, vision or sincerity in using shopping malls to bring China’s culture to a broader audience. Under his leadership, the K11 chain of malls was created: the first of them, opened in 2009, was the K11 Art Mall in Tsim Sha Tsui, located adjacent to the teeming Tsim Sha Tsui and East Tsim Sha Tsui stations and connected to the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It has seven floors, blends retail, dining and art installations, and sits among tens of thousands of hotel rooms, several museums, high-end apartments and more than 100,000 day workers. A short walk south in Victoria dockside is the K11 Musea, another exponent of New World’s ‘cultural commerce’ model, an elegant mashup of retail and art. Recently, an expansion was announced for K11 Musea that would significantly expand the space allocated to luxury labels in the LVMH and Richemont portfolios as well as other luxury brands. The K11 concept has been launched in a number of large mainland Chinese cities as well, but now Cheng is gone, stepping down from New World in the wake of a disastrous $2.5 billion loss in the year ending June 2024. However, the retail direction of the company is still strongly oriented toward luxury, and the audience for its merchandise and art exhibits is primarily a well-heeled elite. K11, for all its quality and ambition, is not yet bringing culture to the broader public. Department stores are trying too A different take on the propagation of culture can be seen in department stores, which in places like Japan, Singapore and Bangkok have seen themselves, at least secondarily, as torchbearers of national heritage. In Japan this has been the case for a hundred years, with department stores sprouting in the early 1900’s from their roots as kimono shops. The stores have long been seen as cultural icons and are sometimes housed in buildings that themselves have achieved national heritage status, such as the Takashimaya flagship store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. In Orchard Road, Singapore, Takashimaya is something of an icon even there, although it is of more recent vintage than its peers back home in Japan. Again, however, the caveat with these department stores is that they target luxury customers: none can really be said to have much interest in the less affluent. Indeed, Japanese department stores are hell-bent on trying to extract as much as possible from the more affluent slice of their clientele, as evidenced by J. Front’s focus on its money-rich and time-poor ‘gaisho’ customers, who are visited by a sales rep from the department store rather than having to go to the store themselves. There is nothing wrong with this and it is good business because the rich account for a disproportionately large percentage of sales, but it has little to do with the average Japanese. Meanwhile, in Bangkok, the former Isetan department store at Central World, which closed in mid-2020 and has now been redeveloped, was also a vigorous promoter of Japanese culture in the sense of its product mix and food and beverage offering. This has been preserved to some extent in the redeveloped building with its strong, authentic Japanese eateries and Japanese grocery. However, the owners, Central Pattana, have cleverly diluted the Japanese component with a number of modern adjustments, including a Shake Shack and Cheesecake Factory on the ground level. Is anyone really bringing culture to the masses? Staying in Bangkok, some of the best examples of cultural transmission are in its glittering malls starting with Em District in the east and running through the city center and out to Icon Siam across the Chao Phraya River in the west.  Why Bangkok? There are three major reasons: first, the three major mall companies ― Siam Piwat, Central Pattana and The Mall Group ― are all headed by female CEOs representing a fresh generation of retail leaders who want their projects to reflect a more grandiose vision than ding-ding-ding at the registers. Moreover, they have strong political connections that go back intergenerationally, so their identity is tied strongly to national culture. (For example, the father of Chadatip Chutrakul, CEO of Siam Piwat owns or part-owns Siam Discovery, Siam Center and Siam Paragon in Bangkok, was an army General and founder of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.) A second reason for the pivot toward culture is an economic one: mall operators are constantly retenanting to allocate more space to non-retail attractions. In major retail markets like Bangkok, art and crafts and local designers have become highly visible components of mall culture. At The Mall Group’s Em Sphere, now barely a year old, there is a rotating art exhibit on the mezzanine level and products from Thai designers are a significant part of the merchandise mix. Icon Siam, Siam Piwat’s trophy mall across the river, boasts a mimicry of a Thai street food scene on the ground floor and an 8000-square-metre Heritage Museum. The third main reason for the cultural bent is differentiation: highlighting local crafts and designers is a way to keep malls fresh and different from one another. And it is extremely popular among tourists, who have a more comfortable and upscale opportunity to shop for high-quality, unique items that they can’t get back home or one of the rough-and-ready Bangkok street markets. More of this in 2025 It is mainly for this third reason that 2025 will see an increase in this ‘mall-as-cultural-purveyor’ trend: while art exhibits appeal to a minority, design and ‘localness’ are winners across demographics and make genuine inroads with a large swathe of the general public and with tourists. The leading edge of promoting local culture at malls will therefore be the products, and not the exhibits or performances. Mall expansions will continue to be led not by art galleries but by food and beverage, and health and beauty, but popups featuring local designers and craftspeople will be increasingly prevalent to keep malls fresh and interesting, attract pedestrian traffic and keep the registers humming. Further reading: Inside Curvistan Bangkok, an experiential space for Porsche fans in Thailand.