Zhou Shen “COCO” Character IP Inflatable Project at Beijing Chaoyang Park

A 15-Meter-Long Zhou Keke
Has Moved into Chaoyang Park

— Notes from the Zhou Keke Official IP Inflatable Project, Chaoyang Park, Beijing

A "big guy" has recently moved onto the lawn of Chaoyang Park — 15.5 meters long, 9.5 meters wide, 7.5 meters tall, with a full spread of 416.62 square meters, roughly the size of a standard basketball court. This is the story of how it went from a flat design drawing to the "giant cuteness" fans line up to photograph.

It is cream-colored all over, with sleepy eyes and two rosy cheeks, sprawled on the grass in a "the weather's this nice, might as well lie flat" kind of pose.

Older folks out for a walk stop for a second look. Young mothers have barely pulled out their phones before they are already hunting for the right angle.

No wonder — to fit this "Zhou Keke" into one complete photo, you need to back up a good ten meters or so.

Want a complete photo with Zhou Keke? Start by backing up ten meters

This is the crowd-puller of Zhou Shen's team official pop-up: the Zhou Keke character IP inflatable.

And we are the ones who turned it from a flat design drawing into the "giant cuteness" now lying on the lawn.

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First, Does It Actually Look Like Him?

Spend enough years in this line of work and you notice a pattern: clients say "make it big, make it impressive," but what they are really fussing over is a different word — like.

Zhou Keke, Nono, and the rest of the official IP family from Zhou Shen's team are all fan favorites. Every detail of their looks is seared into memory.

The curve of the sleepy eyes, the placement and size of the cheeks, that chubby-yet-languid set of proportions — miss it by a little, and to fans it is immediately "off."

Fans bring their Zhou Keke dolls to check in — whether the likeness is right, one glance tells

The original artwork may be only a few dozen centimeters tall. We have to scale it to 7.5 meters — and any distorted curve gets magnified into something glaringly wrong.

So we used the dumbest approach there is: taking it apart. The whole Zhou Keke was broken into thousand cut pieces — drawn, cut, and sewn one by one.

The large sections are the easy part: the sprawled body flows through in a single piece, and the curves come out smooth. The hard parts are the eyes, the cheeks, the corners of the mouth — split into fine pieces, joined one to the next, to carve out that exact curve.

Color was the same story. That warm cream tone, off by a single shade, is invisible on a sunny day — but switch the lights on at night and it shows.

Sample, confirm, sample again; the color was corrected version by version until Zhou Shen's team gave the nod.

Now he lies in the park, fans crowd around taking photos, and nobody finds anything off — that is the result we were after.

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02

A Park Is Not an Exhibition Hall

Landing the installation in Chaoyang Park sounds romantic; doing the work is another matter entirely.

In an exhibition hall, inflatables work in a controlled environment: no wind, constant temperature, no worrying about a child suddenly climbing on.

A park is different — open to the sky, big swings between day and night, and when the wind picks up, the breeze across the lawn is wilder than people imagine.

And this big guy has to live here for the whole run of the pop-up, on duty 24 hours a day.

Zhou Keke stationed at Chaoyang Park, "on duty" 24 hours a day

Start with anchoring. The park management's requirement was blunt: no digging, no nails, no scars on the lawn.

We went with "soft anchoring" — 150 meters of high-strength rope paired with 6 sandbags, pressing and tensioning point by point along the spread-out body.

The ropes lie hidden in the grass, the sandbags can be moved at any time, and when the event wraps, one cleanup leaves the lawn without a single mark.

Then wind resistance. Zhou Keke's "lying flat" pose seemed merely languid and cute at first; when it came to wind resistance, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise — the form spreads low, the center of gravity holds down, and the wind-catching surface is far smaller than that of a standing sculpture.

A tensioning system inside backs it up: where it needs to hold, it holds; where it needs to drape, it drapes. On the windy days he was dead to the world on the lawn, perfectly still; when the wind dropped, he was back to his lazy self, as if nothing had happened.

Then there is operation. Fixed inflation means the blower runs day and night; the built-in 2,400-watt blower handles the job.

It hides inside the structure, its hum muffled in the "belly" — stand next to it on a call or chatting away, and there is no interference at all.

Throughout the pop-up we kept a crew stationed on site: air pressure, weather, rope tension, all checked every day. Fans see him sunbathing; we see him staying out of trouble.

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The Details Nobody Knows Unless We Tell Them

170 meters of LED strips, hidden inside the body.

The easiest trap in night-time installations is treating lighting as "the brighter the better," and a cute character ends up lit like a museum exhibit: exquisite, but cold.

Our choice was to let the light seep out from within — warmer, more even, a touch dimmer.

Zhou Keke at dusk, waiting for dark

When night falls, Zhou Keke becomes a glowing fluff ball, nestling warmly on the grass. Fans come to shoot after dark with no fill light needed, straight out of camera, and a full nine-photo grid for the feed takes no effort at all.

Half of the pop-up's evening foot traffic was carried by this night-light fluff ball.

The few hours of inflation were the quietest and most spectacular stretch of the whole project.

A body of 416.62 square meters "fattened up" on site, bit by bit. Spread out, tensioned, switched on — the flat, sprawled form slowly swells: first a silhouette, then the sleepy eyes, and last, the two rosy cheeks.

In a few hours, a two-dimensional image becomes a three-dimensional, breathing living thing right before your eyes. Only the hum of the blower remained on site; that day, the same moment was saved in countless phones.

On site at the pop-up, there's more than one "big guy"

Why the Client Trusted Us with Their "Baby"

Let's be honest — an IP character is the IP owner's baby. When Zhou Shen's team licenses its official IP for an offline pop-up and hands it to an inflatable maker, what it is choosing is not just price and timeline. It is "can we count on you."

The collaboration began at the design stage — this was no build-to-print job. Zhou Shen's team brought the requirements; we brought the proposals: how to adjust the proportions, how to choose the pose, what color temperature for the lighting, hashed out revision by revision.

During production, key milestones were synced proactively; during installation, on-site support, on call whenever needed.

With officially licensed IP, compliance is the bottom line — how the IP is used, where it is used, and to what extent, all strictly within the scope of the license.

The themed sets on site are part of the check-in route too

This end-to-end approach is part of our core business anyway: custom inflatables built from officially licensed IP, in-person immersive interactive installations, and stage design and visual production for large-scale live events.

The clients we serve have always been the fussiest in the business — organizers of major concerts and music festivals, brand sponsors, commercial real estate and cultural tourism projects.

They share one thing: whatever they hand over represents not just themselves, but years of accumulated reputation. So we treat "no accidents" as rule number one.

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Coda

The pop-up goes on, and Zhou Keke is still lying on the lawn of Chaoyang Park.

Done with Zhou Keke? Remember to look up

By day, he is the crowd-puller fans queue up to photograph; by night, he glows into the warmest blob of light in the park. Grandpas and grandmas ask "what is that thing, so big," and young people answer with a smile, "Zhou Shen's Zhou Keke," while kids hug his feet and refuse to let go.

The best fate an IP character can hope for is to be loved this sincerely by so many.

And our work, in the end, is simple: turn the cuteness on the drawing into something real on the lawn. So that behind every upward gaze and every click of the shutter, someone has your back.