Madao 3000 Sandblasted Swimming Blowfish w/ Boxwood Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

“Madao 3000” is a strange name for a pipe maker, but it is one, like “Le Nuvole” or “Il Cerchio,” that nonetheless carries with it a great deal of meaning. As the pipe making pseudonym adopted by Beijing-based artisan Wang Tieyuan, “Madao 3000” signifies a disposition and a design philosophy.

In the founding Confucian text The Doctrine of the Mean, for example, it is said that there are the “three hundred rules of ceremony” and “three thousand rules of conduct.” These numbers are not literal, instead symbolizing something else; that there are many rules one must follow in order to be virtuous, but that, given the constant flux of circumstance, it would be impossible specify or quantify every choice and decision an individual encounters on their path to virtue. In other words, “3000” is a metaphor for that which is infinite. “Madao,” on the other hand, is more tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating, meaning something like “a worn out old man.”

Together, one might interpret such a name as “a worn out old man, nonetheless chasing the infinite.” How does one pursue the infinite? As far as pipe making goes, at least, Tieyuan’s answer is “asymmetry.” While he displays a prodigious talent for crafting the acorn, brandy, and Dublin shapes associated with post-war Danish pipe making, Tieyuan’s favorite shapes are those that go beyond established conventions and categories. Influenced equally by legendary pipe makers such as Kei’Ichi Gotoh, Hiroyuki Tokutomi, and Alex Florov, and the masterworks of classical Chinese painting and poetry, Tieyuan’s strives to make pipes that are abstract and freeform while also being balanced and harmonious. Instead of contrast stains or fanciful adornments, Tieyuan’s pipes are minimalist in dress, especially compared to his peers. When he does use accents, they are intended to serve as focal points rather than the pipe’s focus. If any one part of Tieyuan’s designs is to be its focus, it is its shaping: its elementary lines and figures; its interplay of symmetries and asymmetries; and its palpable senses of motion and rest.

For this reason, the blowfish is another shape that, like the volcano shapes seen in listings alongside this one, Tieyuan is especially fond of. While the original blowfish, pioneered by Lars Ivarsson, has its own healthy amount of asymmetry, achieved by way of the pipe’s teardrop shank and “fin” running the length of the bowl’s underside, Tieyuan is far fonder of more contemporary evolutions of that form. Like Tokutomi, Gotoh, and, to an extent, Peter Heeschen, Tieyuan pursues an organicism that is—counterintuitively—achieved through the juxtaposition of broad, divergent panels and planes. What at first glance appears somewhat “boxy” becomes far more fluid and mobile, especially when brought together around a winding, “swimming” figure that sways left and right on its way from the front of the bowl to the tip of the stem. As with a number of Tieyuan’s pipes, even the stem itself is not straight, weaving with the same rhythm as the bowl. The draft hole, on the other hand, makes no such deviations as it runs from the base of the chamber to the slot of the mouthpiece.

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.87 / 22.09mm

Bowl Depth: 1.43″ / 36.32mm

Weight: 1.5oz / 44g