Yuwei: Partially Rusticated Cherrywood with Bamboo and Horn Tobacco Pipe

Taiwanese artisan Yuwei Huang possesses a shaping style that favors the Danish and Japanese schools, with a penchant for crafting pieces of a highly stylized, unflinchingly organic disposition. It's almost surprising, then, to see him carve a Cherrywood. I say this because when one considers the Cherrywood as a general shape, the first thought is usually that of the archetypal Anglo-French interpretation, presenting with a cylindrical bowl, straight, upturned shank, curved stem, and maybe a touch of forward cant about the bowl. However, this shape is one that can easily be tweaked and altered to fit almost anyone's personal preferences without fundamentally changing the outline. That is exactly what Yuwei has done here: craft a recognizable profile in a way that is entirely his own, though is still unmistakably a Cherrywood.

The shank and stem here take on a stance that is far more acrobatic than we usually see from more reserved iterations of this shape, and this is owed to two things: the nearly straight stem and the strikingly curved bamboo shank extension it's married to. Drilling curved bamboo is a difficult, time consuming process that Yuwei has achieved to great effect, and his usage of thicker, more densely knuckled bamboo that flares toward the end serves to wrest some visual weight away from the bowl. Said bowl rises to nearly two and a half inches in height, taking on a subtle flare and gestural forward lean as it rises to a softly inflated rim. This wealth of material provides ample space to display the dark, stacked, ring grain-like rustication which covers the walls, while the rim and flattened, sure sitting heel are left smooth and dressed in a vibrant contrast stain. A domed fitment of horn at the end of the bamboo stretch allows the base of the stem to nestle into it and creates a look that's actually rather similar to that of the bowl, as if the aft side of this pipe is a microcosm of the fore. There's an abundance of texture and color here, with pale hues and even more cragginess offered by the natural grass and its myriad nodules, while the stem and horn accent lend smoothness and matching colors of pale green.