How a Tiny ’90s Magazine Helped Define Asian American Style

In 1994, on the shelves of record stores and independent bookshops on the Westside of Los Angeles, the first issue Giant Robot suddenly materialized—a 64-page black-and-white magazine that covered the hyperspecific fringes of Asian American culture like no publication before it.

“We did it without a journalism background. We just did it for fun in the beginning,” says Eric Nakamura, who cofounded Giant Robot and went on to found the influential store and gallery of the same name in the…