How do you create an advantage out of adversity, an asset from a liability?

This kind of questioning, which has informed everything about the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, one of the world's largest contemporary art festivals held in one of Japan's most inhospitable locales, is all the more pertinent in the wake of the recent earthquakes.

In the early hours of March 12, as Japan was still struggling to comprehend the devastation wrought by the previous day's magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami in eastern Japan, a magnitude 6.7 quake, and then several aftershocks, occurred almost directly beneath the snow-covered mountainous region of central Niigata Prefecture, where the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale is held.