"Requiem", painted on a canvas three metres tall and forty-four metres wide in primary colors, depicts people without eyes, noses, or mouths; Shin has stated that this was meant to represent the sense of enslavement and namelessness felt by the Koryo-saram as a result of the deportations.Following his completion of "Requiem", Shin would go on to paint other works on the theme of the deportations and of Korean culture in Central Asia; he began to become well known in the West with his solo exhibition in Moscow in 1990, and another in Tashkent in 1991.