Abstract: In recent years, contemporaneity, a term with specific and changing connotations, has stirred up continuing debates in the West, as part of the attempt to theorize contemporary art. Although these theories have different ways of argument focusing on different aspects, discussions on contemporaneity are all based on the Latin word tempor, which means time, with an attempt to escape from the modern concept of time and to launch a contemporary “temporal turn”. Among these theories, Giorgio Agamben, Boris Groys and Peter Osborne’s arguments exemplify three typical approaches to explore the “temporal turn”, and they claim that contemporaneity lies in its anachronism with time, within the time flow, or in the virtuality extracted from the juxtaposition of multiple present times. The “temporal turn” is pivotal to understand the term contemporaneity as used in the Western context, and delineating the representative approaches is the essential for discussing the theory of contemporaneity in the field of contemporary art.

Key words: contemporary art, contemporaneity, Giorgio Agamben, Boris Groys, Peter Osborne