Underskog

Sven Kirsten is the discoverer and author of three books about a unique facet of American Pop Culture now called Tiki style. This style was the culmination of the fairy tale romance that America shared with Hawaii and Polynesia throughout the 20th Century. In the late 50s to early 60s, the figure of the Polynesian god Tiki became the symbol for the dream of escaping to a South Seas paradise. Carved Tiki gods suddenly decorated restaurants, apartment buildings and bowling alleys in cities all across America. But as quickly as the figure of Tiki rose to prominence it was abandoned by the new generation of the late 1960s as a symbol of a culturally insensitive “establishment”. With its steady decline in the 1970s, the image and the name of Tiki was completely forgotten by the 80s.

After moving to Los Angeles from Germany, Sven came upon the last remnants of Tiki style in the form of Tiki pottery and paper ephemera. He began to collect them and visit the abandoned sites of Tiki temples in California. In 2000, he published the result of his research, the “Book of Tiki”, which for the first time revealed the cultural pervasiveness of Tiki style in its heyday. The book “Tiki Modern” followed in 2007, and in 2014, Kirsten published his largest tome, “Tiki Pop”, in conjunction with the first major museum exhibit on Tiki culture at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris.

Sven Kirsten was born in 1955 in Hamburg, Germany, but since 1980 he has made Los Angeles his home. In his profession as cinematographer he travels to locations from Havana to Prague to Lisbon. In his spare time, he designs Tiki mugs, advises Tiki bars, and is busy assembling more material on upcoming books about Tiki culture.