The vast spread of COVID-19 has been a historical catastrophe around the entire world. It is quite a difficult matter to define contemporary in terms of art under these circumstances. Now, everything is collapsing as if a massive landslide occurred. Identifying the ‘presentness’ of ‘contemporary’ is nearly impossible, and therefore having an integrated perspective for understanding all present phenomenon is unattainable as well. Discussing the historical trend of ‘contemporary art’ studies in Japan in this context is unquestionably hard. However reversely, this kind of adversity could be considered as an inevitable major premise one encounters while researching the studies on contemporary art history. This article starts from the major premise asking what ‘contemporary’ stands for and leads to tracing the historicization process of Japanese contemporary art through several keywords, such as exhibition as a historic spectacle, the exhibition on the historicization of Japanese contemporary art in national/public museums, Japanese contemporary art history of research on exhibition, collected artwork publications and avant-garde, and the description of Japanese contemporary art history by critics.