Yang Kun: Partially Sandblasted Dancer with Bamboo (Signature) Tobacco Pipe

Smokingpipes began hosting the American Pipe Making Expo in 2015, soliciting submissions from North America's premier carvers and affording them the opportunity to showcase their most inventive and creative work. For 2024, to celebrate the Expo's 10th anniversary, we've expanded our scope to accommodate carvers from all over the world, turning the American Pipe Making Expo into the Global Pipe Making Expo. Like in years past, the 2024 Expo revolves around a core theme, and appropriately, given the event's birthday, we've returned to our very first Expo's theme: bamboo.

Drawing on his background as a makeup artist for television and film, as well as his love for Danish pipe making, Chinese artisan Yang Kun crafts highly stylized pipes that are expressive and organic — his style self-evident when considering this Dancer design. Casting a silhouette that evokes the look of a flamenco dancer in motion, skirt flowing, this piece sees a bent Apple-esque stummel resting atop a gradually expanding, and forward-thrusting, arc of sandblasted briar. It's this pronounced protrusion of briar that most readily captures the eye, extending naturally from the bowl's base and lending the totality of the composition a deeply organic motif. That organicism is mirrored by the five knuckles of bamboo out back, the dense grass extending the shank's otherwise short journey to the asymmetrical saddle stem. The bamboo possesses a subtle taper that allows the base of the aforementioned saddle stem to really pop in profile, its lopsided shoulders standing out in relation to the comparatively trim nodes of grass. Kun has treated the majority of the stummel to a warm, glossy smooth finish that reveals a wealth of cross grain and birdseye around the walls of the bulbous, Ball-like bowl, the silky texture of bowl put in stark relief against the drooping "skirt" of sandblasted briar just below.