Summary
The Art of Sarah doesn’t have much of an ending in the traditional sense, but that’s kind of the point thematically, with the most essential question still left deliberately unanswered.
I’ll admit that I’m cheating a little. By positing the question “Who is the real Sarah Kim?” in the headline, I’m implying that The Art of Sarah answers that question in its ending, and, well, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t make the question any less relevant. Indeed, that’s the question threaded through this entire series, and Episode 8’s refusal to answer it is the point. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
But rest assured, this isn’t any kind of web publishing gamesmanship. I’m not trying to bait you with a resolution you aren’t going to get. I’m just setting the stage appropriately, since not knowing who Sarah Kim really is becomes, eventually, the underlying point of this show and character. Nobody, not even Sarah Kim, knows who Sarah Kim is. She’s a spectre, an ever-changing chameleonic idea that can’t really be pinned down or defined.
The Identity Question
The Art of Sarah is shaped like a mystery, but it wears the designer clothes of a character study. But how do you study a character who continuously morphs into someone else? The short answer is that you don’t. You can’t. The key underlying takeaway from this finale is that there are so many versions of Sarah Kim that there is no such thing as the “real” one, even by the end.
Naturally, this idea is complicated by the fact that there’s a body-double angle to it all, but I’m not talking about that. It’s no accident that the structure of this show continuously reinvents Sarah herself. Any impersonations notwithstanding, Sarah is whoever she needs to be at any given moment, and the reality has long-since blurred into the illusion. Sarah Kim, as an individual, isn’t anybody, which is why she’s so adamant about protecting what she has built in Boudoir. That brand is immortal, steadfast, and real in a brick-and-mortar way. The deceptions it was built on are irrelevant. If the difference between real and fake is so slight that nobody can tell the difference, then what do distinctions like “real” and “fake” even mean?
This is the thought process that underpins the climax, which we’ll get to in a minute, so it’s important to get it all laid out. No, we don’t find out who Sarah Kim is, but that’s because she’s ultimately the fruits of her labour, which she’ll go to any lengths, up to and including murder and eventually self-sacrifice, to protect.
The Body in the Sewer
The Art of Sarah is kick-started by the discovery of a corpse in the sewer near a department store. The victim was horribly disfigured, making identification almost impossible, but Detective Park Mu-gyeong followed whatever leads he could. A designer handbag found near the victim led to Jung Yeo-jin, the CEO of Nox, and the body was identified as Sarah Kim, the enigmatic fashionista behind Boudoir.
Of course, the corpse doesn’t belong to Sarah. The victim is Kim Mi-jeong, an employee of Sarah’s who eventually became obsessed with her success and began to impersonate her with scarily accurate detail. Mi-jeong wanted everything that Sarah had built, and Sarah wasn’t inclined to give it away. Conflict was inevitable.
In a physical altercation, Sarah brained Mi-jeong on the side of a table and then deliberately disfigured her with the heavy base of a trophy. Mi-jeong survived longer than you’d think with those kinds of injuries, but by the time she was discovered, she had expired. The irony is that in her death, she became the very person she was seeking to become in life.
Reputation Game
Sarah’s brutal disfigurement of Mi-jeong was to protect Boudoir. Since the corpse is assumed to be Sarah, then Sarah’s “killer” must be Mi-jeong, who Sarah is impersonating in kind. Sarah assumes Mi-jeong’s identity, confesses as Mi-jeong, and is willing to go to prison as her. If Detective Park presses the issue, she’ll simply deny everything as Sarah and walk free. The only way he gets a conviction is if he allows the deception to stand. The guilty party still goes to prison, but her legacy will live on.
With Nox as its biggest shareholder, Boudoir is able to remain in operation despite “Sarah’s” death. Sarah herself, though admittedly as Mi-jeong, goes to prison, satisfied she has protected her greatest accomplishment. And this is precisely why her identity doesn’t matter. For this development to resonate, Sarah has to be defined by Boudoir. The whole point is that it doesn’t matter who she is, where she came from, or what she overcame to build what she built. It only matters that she built it.
As endings go, The Art of Sarah has a pretty good one. It’s just a shame about the rest of it.
