Celebrating Creativity: Echigo Tsumari Triennale 2024
Over recent decades Japan’s creative industries have been harnessed to drive regional revitalisation projects, including large scale contemporary art festivals. The very first of these festivals was Echigo Tsumari Art Field, held in southern Niigata Prefecture. This summer, Echigo Tsumari is enjoying its ninth trienniale and welcoming visitors from all over Japan and the world to enjoy artworks by both major and up-and-coming artists.
Echigo Tsumari was designed as a collaboration between artists and communities, with countless artworks, museums and galleries attracting visitors into a rural region that relatively few people previously ventured into. Discover a culturally-rich and strikingly beautiful landscape, as you are transported deep into rural Japan in search of an amazing array of artwork and partake in a major art festival making a tangible difference to local communities.
Echigo Tsumari Art Field is one of Japan’s largest contemporary art festivals, devised and operated by Kitagawa Fram and Art Front Gallery in Tokyo – the visionary organisation behind the always popular Setouchi and its famous art islands. First held in 2000, Echigo Tsumari brings together major international and Japanese artists, along with up-and-coming artists, designed to take you places you might not otherwise venture – enticed by the artworks that await.
Echigo Tsumari Trienniale 2024
This year, Echigo Tsumari is enjoying its ninth official summer trienniale with smaller festivals taking place in the intervening years. Vast in both vision and the region over which it takes places, installations are set within the landscape while abandoned buildings including schools and ‘kominka’ (traditional farmhouses) are repurposed as museums, galleries and visual and sound installations in their own right. Participating artists have included Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Christian Boltanski, Marina Abramović, James Turrell, Yayoi Kusama and Ma Yansong among many, many others.
The Artistic Reimagining of Landscape & Culture
Ideally-suited to guests staying in Iiyama, we offer guided visits to the festival along a picturesque, less-travelled route that includes notable installations by celebrated artists. Starting with the ‘The Last Class’ – an abandoned school converted into an art installation by acclaimed French artists, Christian Boltanski and Jean Kalman – we then follow a route along scenic rural roads and past terraced rice fields onto the next artwork. Further recommended installations include ‘Dream House’ by Marina Abramović, ‘China House’ by MAD Architects and Ma Yansong, ‘Perspectives of Longing’ by Esther Stocker and ‘Laxudai’ by Toyofuku Ryo*.
The route and included artworks can be modified to include installations not listed here and match the interests of guests, including groups with young children. After all, the festival is designed to be enjoyed by visitors of all ages. Official summer festivals take place from July to November each year. Most artworks can be accessed anytime from May onward and in many ways, visiting outside of the official festival is ideal when visitor numbers are lower. Echigo Tsumari offers escape from the maddening crowds and a creative reimagining of a culturally-rich and strikingly beautiful landscape relatively few international visitors ever witness.