and at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in the fall of 2018. Balcer produced a film documenting Xu Bing's Tobacco Project: Virginia (2011). In 2006, Balcer donated a collection of works by the Japanese woodblock artist Kawase Hasui to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The René and Carolyn Balcer Collection comprises some 800 works and includes woodblock prints, watercolors, screens, sketches and other works and writings by Hasui. A major exhibit of the collection, Hasui: Water & Shadow, opened at the VMFA in November 2014 and ran until March 2015. In 2010, through his Mattawin Company, Balcer sponsored the publication of a 13-volume catalogue of the works of the Wuming (No Name) Group, a cooperative of underground Chinese artists during the Cultural Revolution. In the fall of 2011, Balcer and his wife Carolyn organized and sponsored the exhibition Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974–1985 at New York's China Institute, featuring works from the Wuming, Stars and Grass groups of experimental artists. A larger iteration of the exhibit, Light Before Dawn, opened at the new Asia Society Museum in Hong Kong in May 2013. The exhibit was accompanied by a new documentary written and produced by Balcer, The No Name Painting Association, about the Wuming Group. The documentary was an official selection at some thirty festivals in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, garnering a dozen awards and nominations. In 2011, Mattawin sponsored the publication of a book of photographs by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei New York 1983–1993. In 2014, it sponsored the art exhibit Oil and Water: Reinterpreting Ink at New York's Museum of Chinese in America. Mattawin also co-published A Token of Elegance (2015), a historical and photo survey of cigarette holders as objets d'art; Chow! Secrets of Chinese Cooking (2020), an updated edition of a timeless classic about Chinese cuisine and culture and winner of a 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Award; and the historical biographies Kuo Ping-Wen, Scholar, Reformer, Statesman (2016) and C.T. Wang: Looking Back and Looking Forward (2008). Balcer has contributed essays to Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, and It Begins with Metamorphosis: Xu Bing. Balcer has lectured widely about writing, art and the duties of artists in free societies, notably at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, UCLA, UPenn, and Loyola Marymount; at Internews (Moscow), the Sorbonne (Paris), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Virginia