The Art of Sarah Ending Explained: Netflix’s gripping Korean crime thriller 레이디 두아 is created through Kim Jin-min’s direction and Chu Song-yeon’s writing. The series features Shin Hae-sun, who plays the lead role of Sarah Kim, together with Lee Jun-hyuk, who portrays detective Park Mu-gyeong. The show also features Park Bo-kyung, Kim Jae-won, Jung Jin-young, Bae Jong-ok and Lee Yi-dam, who all help the drama to explore themes of identity, deception and ambition through their performances.
The Art of Sarah Recap
The plot of the K-drama The Art of Sarah revolves around the mysterious murder of Sarah Kim, the founder of a luxury brand, whose seemingly perfect life has many dark secrets and mysteries surrounding her past. As the detectives investigate the case, the truth begins to emerge. Detective Park Mu-gyeong continues to investigate the case, and the more the case unfolds, the more it is evident that Sarah’s perfect image has been built on lies and that her multiple personas are built on illusions. As the case unfolds in each episode of the drama, more of Sarah’s past comes to light, revealing how her ambition, obsession, and social status led her to transform her life in such an unexpected manner.
The Art of Sarah Ending Explained
What Actually Happened at the Boudoir Launch Party?
The Boudoir launch party functioned as the series’s most important point because Sarah Kim experienced her first signs of impending disaster. The party may have looked perfect from an outsider’s perspective as a high-end party which celebrated Boudoir’s new collection with power players, celebrities and movers and shakers in attendance. The personal grudges and financial pressures which affected Sarah Kim created their most destructive impact during the time before the brutal reckoning came.
Sarah Kim was under intense pressure from her former supervisors, Chairman Choi Chae-u and Kang Ji-hwan, after they discovered that she had lied to them about her past and had used them to fulfil her own goals. Choi Chae-u threatened Sarah Kim by demanding she give him a stake in Boudoir in exchange for revealing to him all of her secrets, or what amounted to being blackmailed. This confrontation foreshadowed the eventual unravelling of Sarah Kim’s carefully crafted persona.
Kim Mi-jeong, a former employee who had been obsessed with Sarah Kim’s life and her success, confronted Sarah Kim privately, where Kim Mi-jeong told Sarah Kim that she wanted a share of Sarah Kim’s wealth and fame because she had contributed to Boudoir by designing their products and understanding how their company worked. The confrontation ended up getting out of hand.
In the commotion, Kim Mi-jeong ended up getting seriously injured after her head hit a table. Sarah Kim fled the scene to seek help, but she realised that revealing the incident would tarnish her image and reputation. She decided to take a colder and more calculated approach: to finish what she had already started. Sarah Kim ended up attacking Kim Mi-jeong again to ensure that she would not be easily identified.
Sarah Kim hid Kim Mi-jeong’s body inside a huge luggage bag and threw it down through the department store’s underground waste disposal system, which would end up going into the sewers. Kim Mi-jeong, seriously injured, crawled for a while before eventually succumbing to her injuries and freezing to death.
Who Was Sarah Kim?
Sarah Kim was never a single, fixed identity. She is more of a shape-shifter, someone who has crafted an image that has continued to evolve to meet the demands and favours of the elite.
Her true name is Mok Ga-hui, an exhausted department store worker drowning in debt and humiliation. When she is accused of the theft of a designer handbag, her life begins to unravel. She starts selling discounted designer goods under the alias “Cheongdam Goddess”, but this soon leads her to fraud, threats from loan sharks, and finally, a suicidal stunt after which she disappears and reinvents herself.
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Sarah Kim has many aliases: Woo Hyo-eun, Kim Eun-jae, each of them crafted to help her climb the social ladder to greater wealth, more power, and more elite status. Sarah Kim is the culmination of all of this, the epitome of her reinvented self, someone who is both educated from Oxford and successful in the luxury goods industry, someone who appears almost untouchable, above the rest of the game. By the time “Boudoir” takes off, it is almost impossible to distinguish the persona from the woman herself. Sarah Kim is not only not her name, but it is the culmination of her reinvention, her ultimate self, crafted by her wit, her ambition, and her need to survive.
Who Was the Dead Person?
The body in the sewer was not Sarah Kim, but rather Kim Mi-jeong. Mi-jeong was originally part of Sarah’s team, someone who was involved in Boudoir’s production as a main designer. However, over time, she developed an obsession with Sarah’s lavish lifestyle and her apparent ability to command power. Mi-jeong started mimicking Sarah’s mannerisms, her clothing, and even her identity, moving fluidly between the public and private self, becoming Sarah in the process.
Her obsession with Sarah gradually turned into resentment, especially when Mi-jeong learned that Sarah was not actually a pioneer in the adult industry, but rather a scam artist who built her career on deception and trickery. Mi-jeong felt she deserved the success more than Sarah, so she attacked her at the launch party, and the fight resulted in her death, whose body was later found in the sewer, mistaken for Sarah due to the expensive bag and the tattoo. The irony is that in death, Mi-jeong managed to achieve what she wanted in life – being recognised as Sarah Kim, at least for a brief time.
Was Detective Park Mu-gyeong Able to Catch the Killer?
Yes, Detective Park Mu-gyeong did apprehend the murderer, but he did so with a tangled and morally ambiguous conclusion. As Detective Mu-gyeong investigated further into Sarah’s past, he began to understand that the woman he found in the sewer was not Sarah, but instead all the things that Sarah had done before they met; he realised that Kim Mi-jeong had died at her launch party and that it was Sarah who killed her. When Sarah finally turned herself in at the police station, she attempted to manipulate the situation by claiming she was Kim Mi-jeong and by using a loophole that would allow for no conviction because of her inability to prove her identity.
Detective Mu-gyeong understood that to get a confession from Sarah, she would simply deny everything and walk free under her own name with no real evidence against her. Therefore, he arrested her with the name Kim Mi-jeong, so that she was ultimately going to jail for the murder of Sarah Kim, aka real Kim Mi-jeong, but no one knew how much or what type of involvement she had.
At the end of The Art of Sarah, Sarah is sentenced, Detective Mu-gyeong is lauded for his work in solving the case and is even given a promotion, but Sarah’s true identity remains a mystery.
What Happened to Sarah Kim at the End of The Art of Sarah?
In The Art of Sarah episode 8, Sarah’s final act for Boudoir is to take Mi-jeong’s place and own up to the murder. She takes the fall for Boudoir, thus preserving the brand’s image and allowing the world to believe that Sarah Kim is dead, not that she is a fake and a murderer.
She goes to prison for her crime under Mi-jeong’s name. However, a twist occurs when a scar on her kidney is found, indicating that she is indeed the real Sarah Kim. Legally, however, the question of her identity remains. Despite her confinement, Sarah is somehow content with what has transpired. She realises that her brand, her true self, still exists, and Boudoir is alive and kicking. As the major shareholder of the company is Nox, Boudoir is still running despite the supposed death of its founder. The scandal is thus contained, and the luxurious image of the brand is still maintained. This is a testament to her belief that, in the world of luxury, perception is greater than truth.
In a certain way, Boudoir has become immortal, while Sarah, the person, has become background. The question of her true self has become irrelevant because what has become more important is what she has created.
The ending of The Art of Sarah does not clearly define the essence of the protagonist, but rather implies that our identity is subjective and determined by our interpretation in an illusory or hierarchical society. Sarah is portrayed as an image, a brand rather than a real being. As an individual, she has sacrificed her own freedom for the sake of survival.
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