Internalized Discipline

How power becomes self-regulation. A portrait series examining how institutional discipline is absorbed, justified, and embodied through self-observation, efficiency, and aspiration.

Drawing from nearly nine years of corporate experience, this project examines how discipline operates not only through external structures such as hierarchy and regulation, but through processes that become internalized by the individual. Rather than being purely imposed, discipline is often sustained through self-observation, efficiency-driven self-management, and repeated acts of self-justification—moments in which individuals actively participate in shaping themselves.

Internalized Discipline traces this process as a gradual transformation from the psychological to the bodily. The series unfolds through interconnected stages—internalized gaze, efficiency-oriented subjectivity, self-dreaming, and stabilized identity—revealing how seemingly rational and voluntary choices accumulate into a disciplined mode of being, ultimately materialized in the body.

The work is realized primarily through portraiture. Sculptural garments function as symbolic micro-structures: simultaneously protective and restrictive, they embody systems of control absorbed into everyday appearance. The model’s poses, facial expressions, and deliberately constructed makeup do not represent specific characters, but rather the aftermath of discipline—an ambiguous bodily state suspended between aspiration and compliance.

In these portraits, the body is no longer merely the site upon which power acts, but the medium through which it persists. Instead of locating discipline in a single authority, the project reflects on a more unsettling condition: when discipline is internalized, the boundary between self-determination and regulation becomes increasingly difficult to discern.