NIIGATA, Japan—It’s called the world’s biggest outdoor contemporary-art exhibition, a successful Japanese art experiment with large-scale contemporary works installed in rice paddies, closed-down schools, and refurbished old houses, scattered across 760 kilometers in a rural region about three hours from Tokyo. This year’s 212 artists include Christian Boltanski, Hellen van Meene, and Antony Gormley, and art world stars like James Turrell and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are among the 150 artists with permanent works.

Now in its fourth incarnation, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial is proving again that art can bring life back to dying communities. More than 250,000 visitors from around the world are expected to attend the two-month event this year, bringing with them fully booked hotels and invigorating all types of business in the local community. The triennial has also put the rural region on the world art map, thanks to international media coverage.

When founder and director Fram Kitagawa, a native of the region well known for his successful public art projects throughout Japan, first proposed the event to local officials in 1996, he heard more laughter than interest. For the conservative farmers, art was highbrow museum fare, not the answer for an economy strangled by a low birthrate, an aging population, and decreasing manpower as local youth were lured away to better jobs in big cities. Rice farming, a staple for centuries, was shrinking fast, as paddies produced more weeds than profits.

Now those paddies boast world-class artworks. One of the most visible is The Rice Field by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Created as a permanent installation for the first triennial in 2000, the work has two parts: five fiberglass silhouettes of traditional farmers working in the paddies, brightly painted blue and yellow, and a frame of large, hanging narrative text that describes the rice farming process. With farmers in their family, the Kabakovs were inspired by Kitagawa’s efforts to revitalize the agricultural communities.

With so few children in the hamlets and towns, disused school buildings have also become viable exhibition spaces. This year, 10 defunct schools have been converted into venues, part of the triennial’s “Closed School Projects” aimed at bringing life back to the communities. A sense of revitalization is there, but perhaps not exactly as organizers had envisioned, as many of the works by foreign artists (about a quarter of the 200-plus artists involved this year) reflect death and ghost themes, which are especially powerful in Japan, where the folklore abounds with ghost stories. The empty midnight schoolhouse haunted by the ghosts of dead children is an iconic nightmare buried in the Japanese psyche, making the foreign artists’ work both uncanny and bewitching.

One macabre example is The Last Class, a permanent installation by French multimedia artist Christian Boltanski and lighting designer Jean Kalman encompassing an entire school building. Visitors are guided into a former gymnasium that is almost pitch-black, with whirring electric fans and a floor strewn with fresh straw. The setting is a dark premonition of the works located on floors above: former classrooms bathed in white satin and filled with rows of coffin-shaped glass boxes, empty except for a cold fluorescent light. On one floor, a large pile of used clothing reaching to the ceiling could refer to those killed in Holocaust gas chambers. Originally created for the 2006 triennial, the work was updated for this year with recordings of visitors’ heartbeats, making it even more visceral.

Dutch artist Hellen van Meene’s installation Pool of Tears in another school building is equally eerie. Eleven photographs of morose, ghostly children are displayed on music stands surrounding a piano. A written section from Lewis Carroll’s “Phantasmagoria” offers empathy for real live ghosts, these children incarnate: “That ghosts have just as good a right / In every way, to fear the light / As men to fear the dark.”