Creative markets have rapidly developed in recent years as emerging cultural tourism destinations. Personalized and original products sold by artists and craft artisans have gained popularity among young consumers, making creative markets vibrant destinations for cultural consumption and leisure. Some of these markets are located in industrial heritage sites, providing impetus for the conservation and reuse of obsolete facilities. Beyond their touristic function, creative markets have also emerged as platforms for cultural expression and social interaction among young urbanites, who play a growing role in shaping alternative urban lifestyles and revitalizing urban spaces through cultural participation. Understanding the perceived image of such markets among young visitors offers valuable feedback for the planning and design of industrial site renewal and for the long-term management of creative markets. This study takes the Taoxichuan Creative Market in Jingdezhen as a typical case of industrial site reuse as a creative market. Jingdezhen, known as the Porcelain Capital, has undergone industrial upgrading and urban regeneration over the past decade, with tourism centered on ceramic culture developing rapidly. The Taoxichuan Creative Market is located on the site of the former Universe Porcelain Factory, which was built in 1958 and shut down in the 1990s. The factory was renovated in the 2010s into a multifunctional district that integrates marketplaces, catering, retail, art studios, galleries, and civic activity centers, attracting a wide range of users, from local residents to domestic tourists and ceramic entrepreneurs, and fostering an inclusive and dynamic cultural environment. Since its launch in 2016, the Taoxichuan Creative Market has become the largest and most attractive tourism destination in the city.The dataset used in this study includes 340 user-generated travelogues collected in 2023 from mainstream Chinese social media platforms, Xiaohongshu and Weibo. Based on the corpus, the study adopts grounded theory coding and sentiment analysis, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory of cultural capital to deconstruct the perceived image of creative markets among young people. Bourdieu’s framework is particularly useful for analyzing how cultural value is constructed and negotiated in non-traditional cultural scene, where the boundaries between consumption, production, and identity performance are increasingly blurred. Within the creative market, various forms of capital, including cultural goods, symbols, and services, are produced, circulated, and owned. In this process, market vendors and tourists together construct new social relationships. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of objectified, embodied, and institutionalized capital and their dynamic interactions, this paper explains how creative markets within industrial reuse projects facilitate the co-construction of cultural goods, diverse participants, and urban landscapes through the production of different forms of cultural capital. Furthermore, based on the emotional tendencies expressed in tourists’ perceived images, the study provides the market operator with specific visitor feedback and suggestions for operational improvement. The key research findings are as follows: 1) the perceived image of creative markets consists of three main categories: consumption experiences, environmental atmosphere, and facility services, which collectively construct a cultural capital field that extends into the online sphere; 2)operators should account for the differentiated cultural capital practices of multiple actors, ensure the originality of goods and the distinctiveness of the landscape, and improve the overall level of public infrastructure and services.