Wenlan Hu Frost Biography

Wenlan Hu Frost is a Chinese-born American artist. She was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, China in 1958 and grew up in Beijing after age two. She spent her childhood and youth in a series of displacements during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. First she followed her parents to a labor-camp in Northwest China for re-education, and later she went back to Beijing to live and study independently to finish her middle school education. Following her graduation from high school, she spent another three years in the countryside for her own labor re-education. Later, she went to university to study engineering. After her graduation from university, she worked in engineering, newspaper publishing and management consulting in China. In 1990, she went to the U.S. to pursue advanced education. A year later, she earned an MBA degree from the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as an equity research analyst and investment advisor on Wall Street in New York City.

    Wenlan Hu Frost's artistic career began purely by chance. As a child, she loved drawing, painting and crafts. She copied paintings by famous Chinese masters such as Xu Beihong and He Xiangning. However, in the midst of Cultural Revolution turmoil, she didn't have an opportunity to pursue formal art education. In 2006, when her then seven-year-old son was enrolled at Xinsheng Wang Art School in Houston, her deep love of art threw her back into the art ocean. At the age of 48, she began to study painting under the master painter Xinsheng Wang, where she studied acrylic landscape, still life, and portrait painting.

    In 2007, after a few months of learning painting, Wenlan Hu Frost started to explore her own unique painting style. After much experimentation, she gradually developed and formed her Abstract Symbolism style, which was applied in the creation of her first major important series entitled Chinese Calligraphy 2.0 - The Love Character Abstract Symbolism Series. She was the first artist to present the Chinese character as a symbolic abstract art form on a Western medium. This series was a product of the artist's 32 years of life and cultural experiences in China and 17 years in the United States. It blended Chinese and Western artistic characteristics, creating a unique and distinctive artistic representation of a hybrid of traditional Chinese and modern Western cultures. She had her first solo museum exhibition of this series at the Butler Institute of American Art in Spring 2008.

    In the past several years since that show, she continued to refine her craft while creating new works. She systematically studied Western and Chinese masters' classical works from all times, as well as world art history. She continued to challenge herself, exploring and innovating indefinitely, from landscape to portrait, from representation to abstraction, from traditional art to digital art, from canvas to paper. To date, she has created multiple series of paintings and drawings with about several hundred pieces in total. In particular, she has explored and created the Natural Abstract Series, Natural Expressionism Series, and Fluid Dynamics Series in the last two years. During this process, she has not only absorbed the important international contemporary painting styles, but also gradually formed her own unique signature styles in painting.