“If you can’t tell the fake from the real, is it really fake?” This rich line captures the class-infused theme at the heart of The Art of Sarah, Netflix’s latest K-drama offering. Titled 레이디 두아, or “Lady Doir” in Korean, the eight-episode drama follows a woman who will do anything to break out of her working class hell and ascend to the upper class. A non-linear story of revenge, social inequity, and the power of performed identity, The Art of Sarah keeps viewers guessing until the very end.
The Art of Sarah begins with the discovery of a body in the Seoul sewers. Detective Park Mu-gyeong (Love Scout’s Lee Joon-huk), our audience surrogate character, is professionally committed to getting to the bottom of the apparent murder. However, the more he and his team investigate, the less they seem to know. Initially, they verify the identity of the victim using an ankle tattoo and a one-of-a-kind bag. Both point towards Sarah Kim (Dear Hyeri’s Shin Hye-sun), a member of the Seoul elite who just celebrated the Korean launch of the luxury bag brand Boudoir.
However, while trying to determine who might want Sarah Kim dead, Mu-gyeong quickly discovers that Sarah Kim had secrets of her own—in fact, her entire identity was built on them. Then, mid-way through the series, Sarah Kim walks into the police station alive and well, throwing the case into a completely different direction. Let’s break down the twists and turns that lead to The Art of Sarah’s big ending.
Who is Mok Ga-hui?
The character we are introduced to as Sarah Kim did not begin life as Sarah Kim. As we learn through a series of flashbacks told through the testimony of various witnesses to Sarah Kim’s many cons, and from Sarah Kim herself, the persona was created by a working class woman named Mok Ga-hui, a shop girl at Samwol Department Store, selling luxury bags to the uber wealthy and getting drawn toward the high class status the bags represented.
Ga-hui dreams of a better life, one where she could have the means to own a luxury bag herself. But everything goes wrong one night when she takes a bathroom break during a long shift, leaving the shop open for ransacking. Though she has far less money than Choi Chae-u (Bae Jong-ok), the chaebol who runs Samwol Department Store, Ga-hui is the one who must pay the price. She doesn’t lose her job, but she is told she must pay back the cost of the stolen bags: a 50 million won (roughly $34,650) debt.
A struggling Ga-hui turns to the secondhand luxury bag market to make up the debt. She steals the identity badges of other Samwol Department Store workers in order to attend as many employee sales as possible, where she buys the bags at a discount and then resells them for a profit on resale sites. In order to get enough money to continue the hustle at scale, she borrows money from a loan shark.
But these systems weren’t made to be exploited by the working class, and the loopholes soon close. The department store puts a cap on how much one person can buy at employee sales, and Ga-hui is unable to pay the interest on her loan. Rather than allow Ga-hui to pay back the principal, the loan sharks physically force Ga-hui to sign a new loan with a much higher interest rate. Meanwhile, the police start to investigate the luxury bag reseller known as Cheongdam Queen (for the affluent Cheongdam neighborhood associated with luxury shopping), who has been posing as various rich influencers to sell bags.
Convinced she has no way out of the situation, Ga-hui writes a suicide note and throws herself off of a bridge and into a reservoir. Mok Ga-hui is presumed dead in 2018, and the loan sharks and police stop looking for her.
Who is Kim Eun-jae?
But Ga-hui survives and emerges from the reservoir determined to live and do whatever it takes to get the kind of status and money-driven power wielded by those who carelessly caused her suffering. She is reborn as Kim Eun-jae, and takes a job at a hostess club, where she is paid to entertain men. There, she finds her next target: Hong Seong-sin (Queen of Tears’ Jung Jin-young).
Seong-sin is a rich loan shark who is dying of kidney failure. Eun-jae approaches him with a deal. She will give him her kidney in exchange for Seong-sin marrying her and paying her 500 million won (roughly $346,000). He agrees and the two are married. Because spouses must wait a year after marriage before they can donate an organ, Eun-jae moves into Seong-sin’s home.
Over the next year, Seong-sin teaches Eun-jae the ways of the rich. The two begin to truly care about one another. However, that doesn’t mean Eun-jae doesn’t have another con going. She manipulates Kang Ji-hwon (Hierarchy‘s Kim Jae-won), a handsome man working at a host bar, into caring for her. She insinuates that Seong-sin is a controlling and abusive husband, and that she needs protecting. She sneaks out of her house and the two have clandestine tteokbokki dates around Seoul. Soon, Ji-hwon will do anything she asks.
Meanwhile, Eun-jae begins to lay the foundation for the launch of her luxury bag brand Boudoir. She tells the wealthy women around her about the company used exclusively by European royalty for the past century, and how it hopes to launch in Korea. She calls herself the regional head of the brand, and has Ji-hwon and his host bar colleagues tell all of their clients about Boudoir.
Still, Eun-jae must secure the starting funds. She convinces Ji-hwon to stab Seong-sin, but steps in front of her husband at the last moment. The sacrifice lands Eun-jae in the hospital, but also earns her Seong-sin’s complete trust and devotion. He decides to leave his entire fortune to her.
But we learn that Eun-jae didn’t con Seong-sin just for his fortune. She conned him for the role he played in her darkest moment. Seong-sin owns the loan shark company that forced Eun-jae, when she was Mok Ga-hui, into the inescapable debt that drove her to want to take her own life. In approaching Seong-sin, she planned to give the dying man the hope of a new kidney, only to snatch it away at the last minute.
When Eun-jae disappears before the transplant, Seong-sin sends his men to kill her, but cancels the order at the last second. “I haven’t lost anything. I was the one who agreed to be fooled from the start, so how is that a con?” he tells his goons and Eun-jae over speakerphone, from his hospital bed. Seemingly moved by Seong-sin’s uncharacteristic display of mercy, Eun-jae decides to give Seong-sin her kidney. Following her recovery, she uproots the 500 million won pine tree growing in his garden, and disappears once again. When the world sees her again, she will be Sarah Kim, and she will finish building Boudoir from the ground up.
Who is Kim Mi-jeong, and why does Sarah Kim kill her?
Kim Mi-jeong is the artisan behind the Boudoir bags that would make Sarah Kim millions. After re-inventing herself as American-born, Oxford-educated Sarah Kim, our protagonist needed someone to make the actual goods for the brand she planned on launching. She found Kim Mi-jeong, a runaway working in the sweatshot-like conditions of a knockoff shop. Mi-jeong, who didn’t have the ID necessary to get a legal job, worked alongside immigrants to make the knock-off bags sold at markets across Seoul—and she was really good at it.
After being recruited by Sarah Kim, Mi-jeong also gets a taste of the affluent life and wants more. After successfully impersonating Sarah Kim as a customer in luxury shops across the city, Mi-jeong hatches a plan to kill Sarah Kim and take her place. She gets the same ankle tattoo, and makes sure they both wear the same “one-of-a-kind” dress to the big Boudoir launch party.
When Mi-jeong lures Sarah Kim away and tries to kill her, Sarah Kim gets the upper hand. Mi-jeong hits her head on a table corner, and Sarah Kim soon realizes that it would be better if she could tie up the loose end that is Mi-jeong once and for all. At the party, she agrees to a deal with Choi Chae-u to launch a Boudoir at Samwol Department Store, and has the party’s inventory—including an unconscious Mi-jeong stuffed inside of a case—transported to the store.
Once there, Sarah Kim uses her knowledge of the store’s layout from her time working there as Mok Ga-hui to dispose of Mi-jeong. She sends her down the trash chute and then into the sewer. It would have been the perfect plan, if Mi-jeong were already dead. An injured Mi-jeong wakes up and crawls to a sewer ladder. She dies of exposure before someone can find her, but makes it far enough for Sarah Kim’s crime to be discovered.
The Art of Sarah ending, explained
Detective Park Mu-gyeong manages to piece this all together, but his theory means nothing without evidence. He probably has enough to prove that Kim Mi-jeong planned to kill Sarah Kim, but not enough to prove that Sarah Kim killed Kim Mi-jeong. Mu-gyeong wants the truth to will out and Sarah Kim wants Boudoir to survive no matter what. Boudoir was the dream that kept her alive when she was literally drowning. It is the meticulously crafted, hard-won status she prioritized above all else.
To that end, Sarah Kim realizes her best chance to protect Boudoir is to pretend that she is Mi-jeong and to confess to killing Sarah Kim. Because Sarah Kim is not a real person and Mi-jeong was undocumented, it is impossible to prove who is who. Without a Sarah Kim to prosecute as a scam artist, Boudoir will likely survive.
Detective Park is forced to decide between telling the truth and risk letting a killer go free, and going along with a lie that will lead to that killer’s likely imprisonment. He goes with the latter, and the gambit works for Sarah Kim. Pretending to be Mi-jeong, she is found guilty of murdering Sarah Kim. She is sentenced to 10 years in prison. While there, she is visited by Detective Park, who has since been promoted for his work in “solving” the case. He tells Sarah that Boudoir is doing well without her, and she seems to be happy with how things turned out.
Before they part ways, Detective Park asks her what her name is. Kim Mi-jeong or Sarah Kim or Kim Eun-jae or Mok Ga-hui smiles and stays silent. More than any of those names, her identity was Boudoir. It is why she went to such lengths to maintain the brand’s legitimacy—because it represents her own elite legitimacy, and a victory over all of those who tried to claim it was not something she could build for herself. And, if she can be legitimate, then perhaps the status of the elite-born means nothing at all. Our Lady Doir valued that philosophical victory more than her freedom, more than her wealth, more than any name.
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