South Korea, 2006. The year of SBS’s Alone in Love, MBC’s Princess Hours, and KBS2’s The Snow Queen. Outside the small screen, the country was fascinated by Vincent & Co., a legendary Swiss watch company whose exclusive, luxurious timepieces had been beloved by European royals for over a century.
Behind fancy launch parties, celebrity endorsements, and waiting lists for outrageously priced watches lay one of South Korea’s major fraud cases. Vincent & Co. was a mere hoax: the brand wasn’t real, and its products were just cheap, low-quality gimmicks made exclusive by a carefully devised, incredibly profitable scam (you can read more about the case here!).
Yes, reality can be even more absurd and unbelievable than fiction โ and the right storyteller will surely find some inspiration from it. That was the case with Coupang Play’s Anna (2022), an adaptation of Chung Han-ah’s novel Intimate Stranger, penned by Lee Zoo-young.
You’ll also find clear traces of Vincent & Co. in Netflix’s The Art of Sarah, whose eight thrilling episodes came out on February 13th, 2026.
Directed by Kim Jin-min and written by first-time screenwriter Chu Song-yeon, The Art of Sarah explores the shallowest, proudest, and most soulless aspects of human nature through a knotty narrative whose many threads might not be seamlessly woven together, but whose core message is conveyed with conviction.
This review is spoiler-free. But if you’re in a rush, why don’t you pin our summary? It’s at the bottom!
More Than Who You Are, Who You Seem to Be
The Art of Sarah takes us to the lavish launch party of Boudoir’s 2024 SS collection. We soon understand that Boudoir is an exclusive brand that makes sophisticated bags for the elite. The head of the Boudoir regional office is the stunning Sarah Kim (Shin Hye-sun), who we follow as she walks past photographers, esteemed guests, and sparkly handbags in vitrines. This first sequence lasts long enough to leave the breadcrumbs needed to get this story started. Soon, the scene changes and the glamour is replaced by yearning as people line up in cheap tents outside the high-end Samwol Department Store. Yearning then becomes terror when a young woman in the queue spots a dead body in the sewers.
Arriving at what is now a crime scene is Detective Park Mu-gyeong (Lee Jun-hyuk), the team leader of the Violent Crimes Unit at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency. With little to go on but the victim’s ankle tattoo and fancy handbag, Detective Park identifies the body in front of him as Boudoir’s Sarah Kim.
But more than the identity of the culprit, what truly baffles Park is the identity of the victim herself: There is no record of Sarah Kim anywhere. The Boudoir bags she sold for millions were all counterfeits. Park has just begun to pull a very long and twisty thread from an awfully tangled yarn ball, which is the narrative of The Art of Sarah. With every episode, Sarah gains a new facet, a new name, a new background. This yarn ball that is Sarah’s existence seems to have no starting or ending point, as Park keeps pulling and pulling without ever truly getting to see the whole picture.
We never get to know who Sarah really is because all we have are memories, impressions, and recollections from the people she’s crossed paths with. Even when Sarah gets to tell her own story, her current self matters less than the tale she’s concocting. The Art of Sarah keeps its protagonist’s identity a mystery right up to the very end, thanks to a well-established non-linear framing device (that is, The Art of Sarah is a story within a story) in which all narrators are completely unreliable โ after all, they all have hidden agendas to protect.
The many faces of Sarah Kim contradict one another, making her a kaleidoscopic, elusive protagonist that you don’t know whether to admire or despise. Sarah is brilliantly cunning, hardworking, and resilient. She can be kind but manipulative. She’s cold and calculating, yet warm and welcoming. She’s furious โ at society, at her fate, at herself โ but she’s surprisingly stoic too.
So, who is Sarah? What’s her real name? Where was she born? What made her dedicate her life to this quest for revenge, status, and luxury? These questions are never answered for a very good reason: The Art of Sarah is a story about a world in which it doesn’t matter who you are. It only matters who you seem to be. Sarah’s journey illustrates how society cares much about appearances but little about actual substance.
In The Art of Sarah, we’re all shallow and vain beings stuck in vicious โ and pathetic โ cycles of exploitation. We’re governed by a system that perpetuates societal inequity and feeds delusions of grandeur. Social class is strongly inherited, and social mobility is nonexistent: people are either born into the elite or can only strive to imitate it.
In order to hack this system, Sarah perfects identity performance, taking advantage of the hubris that blinds the people around her to get what she wants. Actually, in The Art of Sarah, hubris is always worse than stupidity. Most characters in the series aren’t dumb or foolish, but terribly arrogant and overconfident. Then, Sarah shamelessly does what the system requires: exploits people’s egocentric belief that they’re naturally owed what they desire and that they are always superior to everyone else. Bit by bit, Sarah shapes reality into what she wants it to be and, to keep the reality she devised alive, she’s willing to give up her identity, her freedom, and her wealth.
The Art of Sarah is a dark, raw, and hopeless illustration of a world void of heart and soul. Through Joo Song-rim’s sharp cinematography, Kim’s precise directing, and intricate production design, the series lives in a universe full of sparkle and glamour, but that always feels awfully superficial. Gloom and sorrow constantly permeate Chu’s script, which is well-paced and marked by riveting twists and nuanced dialogues that never let you come to definite conclusions.
The Art of Sarah: A Con With a Few (Too Many) Loose Ends
Despite its incredible visuals and compelling narrative, The Art of Sarah definitely doesn’t pull off the perfect con. Perhaps because we’re way too familiar with the digital immediacy of the last decade, most of Sarah’s scheme requires too much suspension of disbelief for a story set in 2024. The theatricality that allowed Vincent & Co. to exist in 2006 wouldn’t work so easily a year or two ago โ we now have a world of information at our disposal with our constant and all-pervasive access to the internet.
Besides, Detective Park’s investigative process is severely flawed, and as the narrative tries to weave the threads that create Boudoir together, there’s much that just doesn’t tie up. The more you try to understand the mechanics behind the swindle at the heart of this tale, the more questions you’re bound to ask.
What makes the exaggerations and follies of The Art of Sarah even more apparent is the fact that the show has a single goal: use its mystery storyline to convey its message. And that’s all. The script has no emotional resonance as characters aren’t given any motivation, development arcs, or a personality outside their assigned roles.
That becomes abundantly clear with Detective Park, whose characterisation can be summarised as “archetypal investigator determined to find the truth, and that, for some unknown reason, is often ignored by his own peers and superiors.” In the end, we know as much about Park as we know about Sarah, or any other character, for that matter. Characters in The Art of Sarah lack identity, and while you could say this was also done on purpose to reflect the show’s theme, I could argue that, with a more well-rounded cast of characters around Sarah, the resulting contrast would’ve helped deliver the message even more clearly.
Despite its weaknesses, The Art of Sarah remains an irresistible watch thanks to Shin Hye-sun’s hypnotic performance. Shin has proven to be one of Korea’s greatest actresses time and again throughout the past decade, but here, she’s absolutely fascinating. She gives each and every single one of Sarah’s identities a new twist, delivering a whole range of emotions, oddities, and stances with perfect aplomb. Shin succeeds in fooling us, pulling us into Sarah’s con with charisma and confidence.
It’s also important to note that Lee Jun-hyuk responds to Shin with the same screen presence, giving his character much more than what the script offers him. It’s a huge pleasure to see Shin and Lee perform together (for the first time since tvN’s Stranger back in 2017!), as they naturally bounce off each other and infuse the story with further tension.
Should You Watch The Art of Sarah?
The Art of Sarah is a visually sophisticated mystery-thriller that counts on truly terrific performances and an intriguing premise that keeps you hooked from beginning to end. If you don’t think too hard about the mechanics of the script’s events and hold on to the show’s theme instead, you’ll find in The Art of Sarah some timely social commentary on the performative nature of modern society and its materialistic and exploitative systems.
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