By Morgan Thomas

Motomichi Nakamura, above.

During your typical Basel week, about twelve (mas o menos) art shows come to town. This year, there were twenty-one. On Saturday��������four days into Heist and three days into Basel at large��������I felt like I hadn't even made the slightest dent. But, with all the high-profile passersby at Heist, it was near impossible to leave. Not only did fashion designer Todd Oldham swing by and leave with an affinity for Greg LaMarche��������s paintings, but singer/actress/fashion designer/Amazon Mandy Moore stopped by as well.

A-listers aside, Miami's real celebrities were the artists and our favorite was Motomichi Nakamura. Growing up in Tokyo, the 35-year-old artist said that he loved to draw and was enthralled by stories about dangerous creatures like the Mongolian Death Worm (believed to spit fire and poison in the Gobi desert). He first came Stateside as a foreign exchange student, and, after going back to Japan to graduate high school, returned to attend Parsons in Brooklyn. There, he met his Ecuadorian beauty of a wife and moved with her south of the border, where he began working professionally as an artist. The couple moved back to New York in 2000, where they now live.

"You call this a Mongolian Death Worm?"

And��������spoiler alert!��������Nakamura still loves him a good feed of monster. �������In the past, our ancestors didn��������t know where thunderstorms came from, so they attributed it to �������thunder birds�������� in their writing. Now we know better, but I still want to keep those creatures alive to represent other, somewhat dark topics��������things we don��������t necessarily want to talk about, like violence,������� he explains. The sketch and subsequent sculpture of the Mongolian Death Worm is one such example. These creatures also rear their heads in Nakamura's digital work, whether he��������s working on video games or collaborating on music videos with bands like Sweden's the Knife.

It��������s safe to say we'll be seeing a lot more from this guy and, thanks to Heist, we��������ll be able to say we knew him when.