HS Studio Smooth Asymmetrical Blowfish w/ Boxwood Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

If you’ve been keeping up with the world of Chinese pipe making, their artisan scene has been really taking off over the last decade. Like the great Danish institutions of old, many of these pipes are produced in artisan workshops such as Zhiputang, Qi Studio, and GH Zhang. Hong Kong’s HS Studio follows a similar model, with a team of expert in-house carvers crafting high-quality briars in a variety of styles.

Believe me when I say that photographing this pipe was difficult. But not for a bad reason—quite the opposite. What made it so difficult is that the design of this pipe gets wilder and wilder the more that you look at it. It’s a little like good jazz, in that you’re never quite sure where it’s going next. I’ve labeled it as an “asymmetrical blowfish” but that doesn’t quite capture it (a large part of selling pipes is appeasing search algorithms and their established categories). There is something of the blowfish shapes of say, Lars Ivarsson, in it, but the proportions are also a little reminiscent of the wasp, or Wespe, shapes of Wolfgang Becker. That’s before you account for the additional asymmetries, though. The shank takes a twisting, turning path from the bowl to its end that has much more in common with Japanese and Japanese-influenced pipes, such as those of Kei’Ichi Gotoh, Hiroyuki Tokutomi, David Huber, or Vladimir Grechukhin. Add in the pipe’s boxwood split stem and you’ve got a design that clearly had a lot of thought go into it.

It’s also completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating.

 

Details:

Length: 5.5″ / 139.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.77 / 19.55mm

Bowl Depth: 1.38″ / 35.05mm

Weight: 2.2oz / 64g