Japan seems overrun with art festivals these days -- toss a rock and you're likely to hit one. The Benesse juggernaut, currently sponsoring the Setouchi Triennale, continues to extend its tentacles across the Seto Inland Sea, covering one island after another with shiny new museums and contemporary art installations. Meanwhile region after region jumps on the triennale bandwagon, hoping for a badly needed economic boost or at least a temporary influx of tourist yen. The world's biggest art festival, in terms of sheer acreage, is another Benesse-launched project, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, which sprawls across the hills of southern Niigata Prefecture.

All too easily lost in the shadow of these massively-funded enterprises, and sadly under the radar of most art aficionados in Japan or elsewhere, are local initiatives like the Madarao Kogen Art Festival, held on a ridgetop that forms the Niigata-Nagano prefectural border just a few kilometers south of Echigo-Tsumari. Now in its 19th year, the event takes place every fall, when the colors are at their height in the Madarao highlands. This year's edition is from October 25 through 27. The Madarao Festival makes up in altitude for what it lacks in scale: at 1,000 meters above sea level, it may well be Japan's highest art event.

Yuji Miyao, Time of the Sun, The Shade of Time (mixed media on canvas, 140 x 170 cm).		Yuji Miyao, The Form Lived in Scenery (mixed media on canvas, 140 x 170 cm).

Run by Madarao Mountain Resort (Madarao Kogen Kanko Kyokai), the festival began as an ambitious offshoot of the late lamented Newport Jazz Festival in Madarao, an annual fixture on Japan's jazz scene from 1982 to 2004. Post-bubble hard times put an end to the jazz fest, and also made it fiscally challenging for sponsors to subsidize artist participation in the art festival, particularly from overseas. In recent years fine art was in short supply and the event survived primarily as a local crafts fair.

One contemporary artist who has shown his work at Madarao every year since 2007 is Yuji Miyao, who lives in nearby Nagano. Miyao's association with the festival began when he was introduced to the sponsors by a visitor to an exhibition of his work at a Tokyo gallery. This year, in an effort to expand the presence of fine artists at the festival, Miyao has invited two colleagues from Barcelona, Spain, where he has close ties, to exhibit with him at Madarao. Jaume Amigo shares Miyao's interest in using unusual materials (in Miyao's case, these include pigments, resin, paper, ceramic, and plants) in two- and three-dimensional works that lean toward the abstract, as well as in large, installation-style presentations, both indoor and outdoor. Laia Jou, by contrast, creates drawings that she terms "illustrations" but more properly might be termed expressionist art.

	Autumn foliage in the Madarao highlands. The colors should be at their height in late October, when the festival takes place. All images courtesy of Yuji Miyao and the Madarao Kogen Art Festival.

The three artists will be showing their work during the three days of the festival at Yama no Ie (Mountain House), a spacious lodge-like facility with a grand panorama of the surrounding peaks that serves as the cultural center of Madarao Resort. Also on display at various venues will be crafts by local artisans -- ceramics, embroidery, dolls, woodwork, flower arrangements, beadwork, and vine art.

Madarao's low profile, past and present, in the world of music and the arts is a shame particularly because it is one of the most beautiful, and easily accessible, mountain resorts in the entire country. Surrounding the 1,400-meter peak of Mt. Madarao, the highlands boast a popular ski resort in winter and a network of hiking trails in the summer. Accommodations are plentiful, there are hot springs right in the village, and just downhill is lovely Lake Nojiri. All this -- and art! -- is only a couple of hours from Tokyo, thanks to the Shinkansen that runs to nearby Nagano city. In March 2015 a Shinkansen station will open in Iiyama, only a 30-minute bus ride from Madarao. One hopes that it will encourage more visitors to enjoy future iterations of the art festival.