Ping Zhan Smooth Blowfish w/ Plateaux Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Ping Zhan is undoubtedly one of the most interesting figures in pipe making in the last two decades. Born in China in 1979, Ping initially attended college and attained a degree focused on science and technology, ultimately becoming a software engineer after graduating. But this was not where Ping’s heart truly lay. Instead, he dreamed of becoming an artist.

In 2011, Ping found an outlet for this deep-seated desire in the form of tobacco pipes. Already a collector and smoker of high-grade pieces from around the world, Ping taught himself to make pipes of his own. In fact, Ping’s old website, though now offline, is preserved in a truncated form on the Internet Archive, and there one can find pictures of his very first pipe. Given Ping’s later acknowledgement of Danish and Japanese pipes on his work, it should not be surprising that this first pipe was a broad-based “surfing” Dublin of the sort that one might associate with Tsuge Ikebana or Kai Nielsen. What is surprising is just how good of a pipe it is. Though the website was only active for a few years, there’s still plenty of archived material to sift through to understand Ping’s development. One can also see him beginning to move toward the aesthetic preferences that would become signatures of his contemporary work.

Which brings us to a more recent pipe like this one. While the blowfish is hardly a new shape, one can’t help but be amazed at how light this one is. Not simply in terms of weight (though it is only approximately 36 grams), but in terms of its proportions; its sleekness, its airy, almost floating disposition, and its naturalistic use of asymmetry. While it certainly possesses the hallmark panels and cant of the archetypical blowfish, it is perhaps more like a strange, but beautiful, hybrid of the fugu and the minnow. If you’ve attended the Chicago Pipe Show in recent years, you’ll know that they host a competition called Battle of the Briar, where today’s leading artisans go head-to-head to see who can produce the best pipe within one hour. As it happens, Ping was crowned the winner, with a shape not unlike this one.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating.

 

Details:

Length: 5.5″ / 139.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.75 / 19.05mm

Bowl Depth: 1.30″ / 33.02mm

Weight: 1.2oz / 36g