Abstract: With the process of urbanization, the aesthetization of economic activities as a new subject has deep influences on social lives of contemporary China, deserving to be researched. The thesis clarifies the function of aesthetics in both the design of commodity display and the creation of the atmosphere of shopping space. The thematization of the shopping areas is increasingly evident, while in the thematized shopping areas aesthetic imagery has been created. In the meantime, shopping areas are becoming the“consumption spaces endowed with meanings” based on semiotic system. With the design and metaphor, they divide people into several cultural groups, classes of different aesthetic taste or life styles.