Wenlan Hu Frost is a Chinese-born
American painter who has created a new synthesis of traditional Chinese
and modern Western art.
Wenlan Hu Frost was born in Chengdu, China in 1958 and grew up in Beijing after age two. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, she spent three years in the countryside for labor reeducation following high school. She studied electrical engineering in university and worked in engineering, newspaper publishing and management consulting in China. She earned an MBA from the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and worked as an equity research analyst on Wall Street. There she experienced the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 2001 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The 9/11 terrorist attack damaged her home, which was only one block away from the World Trade Center. As a result, she and her young family opted to leave New York City for Houston in 2002. Wenlan Hu Frost became a citizen of the United States in 2005, fifteen years after she entered the country. Currently, she lives in Houston with her husband Daniel Allen Frost and their two young sons Daniel and David.
As a child,
she loved drawing, painting and crafts; she made her first embroidery
art of Chairman Mao at age 7 during the Cultural Revolution. However,
she never pursued professional art training in her youth. Years later,
when her seven-year-old son was enrolled at Wang Xinsheng Art School in
Houston in 2006, her deep love of art was re-awakened. In November 2006
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
she developed her Abstract Symbolism style in the course of producing
her first major series entitled Chinese
Calligraphy 2.0 – The Love Character
Abstract Symbolism Series. She had her first solo museum
exhibition of this series at the Butler Institute of American Art in
Spring 2008. She was featured
on the cover of the Chinese magazine
China Elite in August 2008 and
was also featured
in China Collections in
August 2008.
