Abstract: The term ‘contemporary Chinese art’ is used in an Anglophone context to denote various forms of avant-garde, experimental and museum-based visual art produced as part of the liberalization of culture that has taken place within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) following the ending of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the subsequent confirmation of Deng Xiaoping’s program of economic and social reforms at the XI Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in December 1978. Since its inception during the late 1970s,contemporary Chinese art has been characterized by a combining of images, attitudes and techniques appropriated from Western(ized) modernist and international post-modernist art with aspects of autochthonous Chinese cultural thought and practice. Within the context of an English language dominated international art world, contemporary Chinese art is widely considered to be a localized variant of post-colonialist post-modernism whose hybridizing of differing cultural outlooks/modes of production acts as a focus for the critical deconstruction of essentialist/hierarchical conceptualizations of cultural identity underlying colonialist- imperialist relations of dominance. In contrast, within the PRC there is a dominant anti-imperialist belief in the existence of a spatially bounded, Chinese national-cultural identity that has the potential to manifest itself through autochthonous artistic and cultural practices including those associated with contemporary Chinese art. The text presented here addresses this contestation of the significance of contemporary Chinese art with reference to essays written by Wu Hung and Gao Minglu as part of emerging debates relating to the concept of contemporaneity. In their respective essays, both Wu and Gao argue that contemporary Chinese art has been shaped in relation to experiences and representations of modernity within the PRC that differ markedly from those associated with modernist and post-modernist art in the West, and that, as a consequence, contemporary Chinese art should not be interpreted simply from an internationally dominant post-modernist point of view. In analyzing these essays critically, I shall argue that Wu’s and Gao’s separatist accounts of the significance of contemporary Chinese art rely on highly selective readings of historical ‘fact’ and, what is more, that they are theoretically contradictory and therefore unsustainable. I shall conclude by asserting the continuing political and ethical relevance of deconstructivist/post-modernist readings of contemporary Chinese art as well as offering some first thoughts towards a general critique of contemporaneity.