Smooth Blowfish Tobacco Pipe

With roots in Japanese pipe making, the Blowfish is a striking design marked by crisp facets and firm ridgelines. That said, it takes well to individual carvers' creative licenses, with stylized renditions differing dramatically from artisan to artisan. This iteration from Yuwei Huang maintains the design's typically characteristic panel around the vertical axis, wrapping the underside before rising up the fore and across the rim. This particular piece also hints at a Ray Kurusu version we've seen before, the shank curling upward and connecting with the bowl's aft to virtually eliminate the transition. In his take, though, Yuwei has positioned the curled shank slightly off-center to the right of the bowl when viewed from the smoker's perspective. The saddle stem, then, fits directly into the mortise via a push-style tenon, the mortise stabilized by a surrounding ring of brass and the disc-like base of the stem perfectly oriented to align with the face of the shank. While the shaping here is superb, what stands out most is the superlative grain Huang has brought out of the briar — cross grain runs tightly all along the middle panel, while dense whorls of birdseye dominate the flanks.