Xin Li Sandblasted Strawberry Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

A graduate of industrial design and art history, Xin Li came to pipe-making by chance, after a mutual friend introduced him to the notable Chinese artisan Yang Zhimin. Xin and Yang quickly developed a rapport, in part because both had attended the prestigious China Academy of Art, and because both had an affinity for woodworking. Yang took Xin on as an apprentice in his workshop and, soon enough, this apprenticeship became a pipe-making partnership. For several years, Yang and Xin worked together in handcrafting pipes under Yang’s Zhiputang make. In 2019, Xin departed from the Zhiputang workshop and the partnership was amicably dissolved, with Xin moving on to create pipes under his own name, while Yang continued with Zhiputang.

I have a mental list of brands and artisans that I would like to bring to MBSD and our customers, similarly to the way most of us have lists of pipes that we would one day like to own for ourselves. Xin Li has been near the top of both of those lists, for me, for quite some time, so I was quite ecstatic when Xin agreed to allow MBSD be one of his retailers. When the pipes arrived, I was even happier, as they were exactly what I had expected after following Xin’s output over the last few years.

Enthusiasts for Scandinavian pipes should immediately recognize this particular pipe as possessing the “strawberry” bowl shape that evolved out of the post-war artisan scene in Denmark (the “Peewit,” the “acorn,” and the “potato sack” being close relatives). What I particularly liked about this one is that the combination of the texture of the bowl’s crisp sandblast and the unusually vibrant contrast stain used made it look more like a strawberry than many of the real strawberries I’ve eaten in my time on this earth. As for the rest of the pipe, the design pairs the bowl’s unorthodox hue with a similarly unorthodox stem and ferrule hand cut from tan ebonite, with a rod of two-knuckle bamboo connecting them. Yet despite this unusual mixture of elements, the design is not only enjoyable, it’s seamless, with each element uniting with the others in a cohesive whole. There is an old philosophical idea that beauty resides in the unity of form. Pipes such as this one – even if it is, as a pipe, not something we could claim belongs to a purely disinterested appreciation – always remind me of that.

 

Details:

Length: 5.8″ / 147.3mm

Bowl Width: 0.73 / 18.54mm

Bowl Depth: 1.32″ / 33.52mm

Weight: 2.3oz / 68g