Just a few hours north of Tokyo's seemingly endless sprawl is the mountainous region of Echigo-Tsumari in Niigata Prefecture. Like so many other rural parts of northern Japan, it is a rugged, isolated, aging and economically stagnant place where elderly men and women can be found doubled over in terraced rice paddies with their hands in muck as their kind have done for 1,000 years.

It could be any number of places in this country, beautiful but overlooked, with a population bound by tradition and with nothing to look forward to but its own seemingly inevitable demise. But in Echigo-Tsumari all is not as it seems. The region is the home to an experiment in rural rejuvenation that is also one of the most successful and progressive regular exhibitions of contemporary art anywhere.

The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial -- staged in 2000, then 2003, and again now -- is by far the largest outdoor exhibition of art in the world. Hundreds of works of contemporary sculpture, installation and video by artists from across the globe are scattered across a mountainous exhibition area approximately the size of greater Tokyo. Art is everywhere, and for the more than 250,000 people that are expected to visit the region, many of whom come from outside of Japan, between July 23 and Sept. 10 anything and everything in this vast rural landscape becomes a possible "work."