There’s coffee, and if you head past the fancy gleaming espresso machine at ARS Cafe & Gallery — the newest addition to the Honolulu hipster scene — to the gallery in back, you can also get a charge from the irresistible “Giant Robot” exhibit on view.

In a chic white space, cheeky blue illustrations of puppies on playground slides, acrylic paintings of cute-yet-tragic animals wearing masks, small countertop installations of cheery blue and yellow flowers with faces, and penciled manga drawings await your contemplation.

For this exhibit, works by Los Angeles artists Peter Chan, Maggie Chang, Luke Chueh, David Horvath, Mari Inukai, Deth P. Sun, Katsuya Terada and Yoskay Yamamoto were brought together by curator Eric Nakamura, who launched Giant Robot as a magazine in 1994. “Back then there wasn’t much Asian-American pop culture in the news or media,” Nakamura said. “My idea was to create an outlet.”

The magazine quickly morphed into a worldwide celebration of Asian-American culture, exploding in popularity until at one point there were several Giant Robot brick-and-mortar stores, a retail website and a themed restaurant. After two decades the brand is still influential, and Nakamura is respected for having provided many Asian-American artists with places to show their work.

“Eric developed and cultivated relationships with artists in the contemporary art scene, including myself. A lot of us wouldn’t be doing art now without his name and reputation,” said Chueh, the only artist in the show who was able to come from LA to attend the opening reception June 4.

Chueh’s work in the show includes 12-by-12-inch acrylic paintings and 9-by-12-inch graphite pencil portraits of bears, monkeys, pandas and chickens. Each piece treads the lines between cute and tragic, amusing and morbid. “I work primarily with anthropomorphic characters,” said Chueh. “A lot of these animals have their own, tragic cultural narratives. For example, monkeys are just one chromosome shy of being human, and chickens can’t fly, even though they are birds.”

The bear and panda illustrations, he said, are metaphors for himself — his nickname growing up was “Bear,” and the pandas, like him, are of Chinese descent. “I grew up in Fresno, Calif., and experienced a lot of hardship, such as outright racism and bullying, that I don’t think I would have experienced if I was in Hawaii,” Chueh said.

“Of course,” he added, “I’m 43 now, and I’ve outgrown a lot of those experiences, but I find myself referring to them in my work in ways that are beyond just the negative, and modify them.”

Nakamura hopes to bring another Giant Robot exhibit to Hawaii next year and make it an annual event. “We have a fan base here, and I think Hawaii, with its mix of cultures, is receptive to Giant Robot, even if the art market might be smaller than LA.”

The exhibit provides just a small but intriguing glimpse into the vast Giant Robot universe, and makes a perfect fit for ARS Cafe & Gallery’s eclectic vibe. Behind the diverse artwork of adorable things and a culture of cute, the exhibit subtly reminds us that while we might take Hawaii’s embrace of Asian-American culture for granted, there were many who have had — or still have — a long struggle to find acceptance.