Wenlan Hu
Frost is a Chinese-born American artist. 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
remote 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 came to the U.S. to pursue advanced education. A year later,
she earned a Master of Science degree in Management of Technology
(MBA) from
the Sloan School
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Afterward, she
worked as an equity research analyst and investment adviser on
Wall Street in New York City for seven years before she went back
home to raise and homeschool her two sons. She became a U.S.
citizen in 2005.
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. 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 Daniel was enrolled at Xinsheng Wang Art School in Houston,
her deep love toward art was awakened. At the age of 48, she began
to study painting under
Chinese 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 16 years since her solo museum
exhibition, 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. During
this process, she has gradually formed her own unique signature
painting styles.
In 2015, she and her family invented
SQUAREMINO® board game
as a homeschool project. They developed the Squaremino board game
concept, designed and prototyped the game pieces, refined the
playing rules, and produced the whole game, making it a commercial
product.
Since 2018, she has been operating her
official Etsy
shop where she curates and offers her artistic products and
art supply items, serving the American creative community.
In 2022, together with her husband Daniel
Allen Frost, an MIT PhD, she has started venturing into the NFT
world. They have revisited her past artworks and digital artworks
that they have created together since 2008 and turned them into
seven digital artwork
NFT collections,
exhibiting them on OpenSea marketplace. They didn’t list them for
sale in the last two years for various reasons. In the 2nd quarter
2024, they started to list and sell their four 10K NFT
collections.
Creating original art, especially painting, is
always Wenlan Hu Frost’s love and passion.
