This commentary reads Ariel Salleh's DeColonize EcoModernism! (2024) from inside institutional curatorial practice, tracing how her concept of the Androcene - the entangled system of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism - illuminates structures the Korean art world has largely refused to name. Three sites of friction anchor the argument: the opening of Centre Pompidou Seoul, funded by a defence industry conglomerate, as a case of art-washing; the shadow labour of waste and maintenance workers, and the internal colonial relation between Seoul and its provinces, made visible through the Earth-Sea Study programme at Alternative Space LOOP; and Touchy-Feely (West Den Haag, 2024; Alternative Space LOOP, 2025), an exhibition that mobilized touch as a feminist counter to ocularcentrism. Through Ppaeppeol Project's work with Durebang, an organization based in a camptown, the commentary asks whether participatory and healing-oriented art practices risk normalizing damage rather than contesting it, and what feminist practice can achieve inside institutions that were not built for it. It closes with the Ecofeminism Workshop and the Feminist Art School as collective attempts at what Salleh calls re-grounding: rebuilding artistic knowledge on the terrain of care and reproduction that dominant art history has suppressed.
