Cross-border integration and innovative development of contemporary oil painting in the era of new media

Abstract

Contemporary easel oil painting develops within a new-media environment and an accelerated cross-border exchange of artistic techniques, which raises the question of whether its substantive core is preserved. The divergence of scholarly positions – from the thesis of the picture dissolving into the installation and digital environment to the claim that pictorial innovation originates within the medium itself – defines the problem of the study. The aim is to determine how cross-border integration and new-media tools jointly transform oil painting and whether the easel medium retains its core through these transformations. A comparative-typological method, art-historical description and structural-functional analysis of the parameters of a pictorial work are applied to Russian and Chinese practice of 2018-2026. A typology of the forms of interaction between oil painting and new media is constructed, from the digital sketch to the tokenized double of an easel work; the Russian and Chinese models of integration are compared; a periodization of the assimilation of new-media tools is proposed. It is established that different media technologies affect non-coinciding parameters of the work: the digital sketch and augmented reality leave the material carrier untouched; generative algorithms and the blockchain infrastructure shift the status of the original and of authorship. Preservation of the pictorial medium is achieved through a redistribution of its functions between the material carrier and the digital representation, with no return to the pre-digital autonomy of the picture.