Among the many works displayed inside the Guangzhou Museum of Art, one marble sculpture draws more attention than any other. Visitors who otherwise stroll through the collection often pause there. They do not stop to reflect, however, but to pose, smiling and raising their phones to capture a moment of amusement.

Yet, in the process of watching nearly every person who comes upon the piece photograph themselves beside it, I began to sense that the sculpture was quietly resisting its audience. It was offering something far more serious than viewers assumed.

The sculpture is by Xu Hongfei, one of China’s most recognizable contemporary sculptors, best known for his ongoing Chubby Women series. However, this particular work is not one of the cheerful, kinetic bronze figures he would later become famous for. Made in 2000, the marble piece, titled Summer, appears to belong to the earliest stages of the aesthetic and conceptual direction that would later define his career.

Summer predates the global exhibitions, the buoyant smiles, the comedic physicality. It is an origin point and its difference from the later works illuminates what Xu had not yet smoothed over or stylized.

The sculpture depicts a naked woman crouched down, her head buried deep in her folded arms. Her body is large, soft and heavy, with folds around her waist and loose flesh along her arms and legs. There is no attempt by the artist to idealize or beautify her form. Instead, he exposes every contour shaped by time, labor, economics and circumstance. The marble, cool and luminous, contrasts with the weight of her posture and the emotional density of her pose.

Her interior life is erased by the spectacle she unintentionally provides. We see the effects her life has had on her body, instead. The world she lives in shaped her body. People gather to take selfies with her because she is exaggerated, humorous or strange, especially in parts of Asia where there are still strong cultural expectations regarding a woman’s appearance.

Hongfei has not sculpted a fit, toned and seductive young woman; he has sculpted, basically, a naked restaurant worker or street vendor and this seems to tickle the onlookers. Yet, the humor is not hers. The laughter belongs entirely to the spectators.

This disconnect reveals the sculpture’s deeper tension. While Xu Hongfei would later lean into irony and celebration in his portrayals of full-bodied women, Summer radiates a quiet tragedy. There is no smile, no playful exaggeration, no movement suggesting freedom. Instead, the posture is closed, protective, and weary.

Her right foot hooking uncomfortably in toward her body is the chief clue that she has withdrawn completely from the world to examine her life and deal, perhaps, with the full measure of pain and difficulty her life might encompass. It’s a sculpture that elicits empathy and encourages one to recognize these souls in the world so that one might find a way to comfort them, or show them some compassion and fellowship.

She is a figure withdrawing from the world, not performing for it. If there is humor to be found here, it is imputed to her, and not the artist’s invitation. To me, it borders on an act of cruelty to smile and pose in front of Summer, even though Xu Hongfei’s future sculptures obviously invite joy and mirth as the sculptures themselves express an overt enjoyment of life.

Summer becomes a social portrait. The woman’s body, unadorned and unhidden, points us toward the realities of class and labor in contemporary China. Her moderate obesity is not a symbol of indulgence but of deprivation. It reflects a body shaped by stress, cheap calories, irregular schedules and the invisible demands placed on working-class women.

This is the type of woman seen cleaning floors, preparing street food at dawn, serving noodles in late-night restaurants, present everywhere and yet largely unnoticed.

Clothing, had Xu chosen to add it, would have provided a narrative shortcut. It would allow viewers to categorize her quickly: a cleaner, a vendor, a mother, a middle-aged woman with a service job, and then ignore her, stroll past her. But nudity attracts attention to her and denies that simplification. It forces us to confront her body not as a worker to be used and ignored, but as a person, human, vulnerable and affected.

The decision to hide her face reinforces this universality. With her head buried in her arms, she becomes not an individual but a type, a stand-in for the many women whose identities are blurred or erased by society’s routine indifference. Yet indifference is not quite the right word, for women like her are what we came to call, during the pandemic, essential workers.

They are the people we rely on daily, whose labor quietly sustains the ordinary functioning of life. And still, we treat them with a level of disregard that mirrors the coldness of the most exploitative corporations toward their own workers. The anonymity is not dehumanizing; it is accusing. It tells viewers: You see women like this every day, and yet you do not see them at all. You use them, perhaps, without showing them honor or gratitude. The sculpture invites empathy in the place where recognition has failed.

And then there is the title: Summer. The word adds a layer of interpretive complexity. Summer in Chinese art and literature is often associated with abundance, heat, ripeness, energy, fullness. Yet this woman does not embody ease or warmth. If anything, she suggests the other side of Summer: fatigue, oppressive heat, the bodily heaviness that comes from laboring through humid days.

She is the season’s exhaustion, not its exuberance. The title, perhaps intentionally, introduces a contradiction that deepens the emotional resonance of the sculpture. Xu Hongfei may be signaling that the life of this woman, her body, her weight, her posture, is not merely an aesthetic choice but a seasonal condition, a cycle imposed by social climate rather than natural weather.

Placing Summer within Xu Hongfei’s broader oeuvre also clarifies its uniqueness. In later years, his Chubby Women sculptures would become globally known for their levity. His women dance, leap, fly, ride bicycles, their bodies are not burdens but engines of liberation. These works are empowering in a way, celebrating fleshiness in a culture steeped in thinness.

Yet they also risk being read as caricatures, their joy sometimes appearing disconnected from the struggles that shape real women’s lives. Summer, by contrast, does not attempt to compensate or uplift. It refuses the escape into humor. It is grounded in the weight of reality, literal and figurative.

It suggests that Xu originally saw the theme not as a joke but as a condition, perhaps even a symptom of social forces and a call for empathy. The laughter in his later works may have emerged not from denial but from a desire to counterbalance the sadness present in this early piece.

And perhaps that is why Summer draws such an ironic response from museum visitors today. In a culture increasingly defined by surface reading, the quick image, the selfie, the punchline, the work’s somberness becomes invisible. Spectators react to the shape, not the story. They pose beside her as if she were whimsical, not weary.

In doing so, they unknowingly re-enact the very dynamic the sculpture critiques: the tendency to notice but not see, to look but not understand. Yet the sculpture remains patient. Marble does not answer back; it simply waits for a viewer willing to pause, to take in not just the form but the emotional architecture carved into it.

When viewed with attentiveness, Summer quietly invites sympathy for a woman whose life has been shaped more by circumstance than by choice. It offers a rare artistic acknowledgment of the working-class female body, not romanticized, but simply present, with all its burdens visible, and suffering.

In the end, what moved me most was the realization that the sculpture’s real audience may not be the people snapping selfies at all. It may be the people who never set foot in the museum: the women whose invisible labor sustains daily life, who carry the physical evidence of their struggles on their bodies, and who, like the figure in Summer, crouch under the weight of responsibilities we rarely see.

To encounter this woman in marble is to encounter a truth often hidden: that behind every public gesture of humor or celebration, behind every stylized representation of “chubby women,” there lies a human story shaped by forces much larger than individual will. Xu Hongfei’s Summer, quiet, unadorned, and unexpectedly solemn, reminds us that the most ordinary bodies can carry the most extraordinary burdens, if only we take the time to look, and to think, and to try to feel and understand what they do.