of Culture Merit (문화훈장); he then donated Requiem to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Aside from his own artwork, Shin also took up a teaching post at his alma mater, the Benkov Art School, despite the low salary; he became a mentor to his student Elena Lee, another Uzbekistani painter of Korean descent, whose work was featured in 2004 at an exhibition in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He died August 18, 2006, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He is survived by a wife and three sons. Documentary In 2001, Shin's life story was made into a documentary film Sky-Blue Hometown, directed by Kim So-young. Kim stated that she was inspired to tell Shin's story after seeing Requiem displayed at the National Museum of Contemporary Art and reading articles in the domestic press about Koreans in Uzbekistan. Through the film, she hoped "to convey the earnest wishes and lost dreams of the victims, rather than render a bleak ambiance of the hurt and resentment endured by Koreans as a minority race in the former Soviet Union and Central Asia at the present time." After completing the film, she was disappointed by the initial lack of domestic interest; though it won grand prize at the Seoul International Documentary and Film Festival and was honoured as the best Korean documentary at the Pusan International Film Festival, local distributors remained uninterested in the film. Sky-Blue Hometown would go on to be invited to several international film festivals in 2001, including the Asian American International Film Festival in New York, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and the International Festival of Audio-visual Programs in Paris. In November of the following year, it won the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema prize at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival. However, it was not shown in cinemas in Korea until 2003. Credits Director: Kim So-young Production: Cine-Maya Screenplay: Kim So-young Photography: Nikolay Gerasimov Editing: Kim So-young Sound: Won-jong Soh Music: Duck Hyun, Jun-sung Kim, Young-jo Lee World Sales: Cine-Maya Screening copy: Korean Film Commission Works Exhibitions 1990: Trechakopskaya Art Gallery, Moscow 1991: National Museum of Art, Tashkent 1995: National Museum of Art, Tashkent 1997: Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul 2006: Korean Culture Day, Tashkent Paintings References External links Sky-Blue Hometown Online gallery of Shin's work hosted by the Chosun Ilbo Soviet painters Koryo-saram 1928 births 2006 deaths 20th-century Uzbekistani painters Soviet