Asceticism examines the inner transformations that unfold through restraint and endurance. Rather than expressing anxiety and wounds through dramatic emotional release, Jeong Jin Gab focuses on the act of pausing, enduring, and turning inward. For the artist, making art is not simply a means of producing an object, but a form of discipline through which he repeatedly confronts his own interiority. The figures in this exhibition inhabit this process, quietly searching for their form somewhere between instability and maturity.

Jeong’s sculptures originate in drawing. Having spent years studying the human figure through sketching, he approaches sculpture not so much by building mass, but by shaping the body as though drawing with lines. Lines running across the faces and bodies of his figures move between two and three dimensions, revealing both their physical contours and psychological interiors. At times resembling marks or tattoos inscribed on the skin, these lines suggest traces of memory and trauma, introducing an elusive emotional layer onto the otherwise solid surface of sculpture.

Most of the figures remain still, their bodies held in restrained and contemplative poses. Yet this stillness does not signify passivity or resignation. Rather, it suggests a state of stepping back from emotional turbulence in order to observe oneself. Instead of erupting, the figures endure; instead of immediately reacting, they remain. Their bodies turn restraint and patience into physical attitudes. For Jeong, endurance is not a passive acceptance of suffering, but an active process necessary for reconstructing a self that is constantly being unsettled.

The recurring image of the girl in Jeong’s practice similarly extends beyond the representation of a specific individual. It evokes the fragile self that remains within each person: memories of childhood, unresolved wounds, and emotions that persist within the adult body. Through this notion of the “inner child,” the figures occupy an ambiguous state between childhood and adulthood, vulnerability and maturity. They are incomplete beings who continue to carry their past while moving through the process of becoming.

Their elongated, slender bodies further articulate this condition. Reduced and stripped of excess, the body becomes more than a stylistic device; it begins to resemble a process of ascetic subtraction. As volume and flesh are minimized, the figures gradually move away from realistic representation and toward psychological forms. They appear as bodies in the act of releasing external weight, becoming lighter as they shed what is no longer necessary.

In Asceticism, maturity is never presented as a completed state. Instead, it exists as an ongoing process of repeatedly questioning oneself, confronting another self within, and continuously transforming. Jeong’s figures have not reached the end of this process. They are still enduring, shedding, and reforming themselves.

In his sculptures, endurance is therefore not a state of immobility. It is a sustained movement through which an unstable self attempts to retain its form—a discipline through which an incomplete human being moves toward another version of the self.