The North is where my creative destiny lies. The scenery of the North Pole reminds me of the primordial form of mankind and nature.

The modeling of “Pole” occurred by chance. The earliest experiment was No.25. This came first, although I numbered it No.25.

The outer appearance of this kind of painting with its sense of rising has the morphology of the famous architecture of the Strasbourg Cathedral in Germany. It leaps into the sky to a spectacular height, its rich shadow is wide and complex and it has a thousand intricate details. Within its huge but harmonious body, it expresses a beautiful concept of the sublime, and it contains a feeling of the eternal harmony and soundness of humanism. Here, what the creator and the created feel is serenity and solemnity, and by no means just the ordinary delightful feast for the eyes.

(Statements by the Artist, 1985)

At the beginning of the 1980s, Wang Guangyi was a standard cultural utopianist. He believed that a healthy, rational and forceful civilization could rescue a culture that had lost its beliefs. His early artistic movement “Northern Art Group” and the early North Pole Amalgamation series, both presented the passion and illusion of his pursuit of a kind of omni-culture, and the characterization of this kind of civilization was rich in order, gravity and concision.

(Huang Zhuan, Visual Politics: Another Wang Guangyi, 2008 [Extract])