‘Buwaya Baby’ @ ARTS at King Street Station

ARTS at King Street Station is a place of unexpected discoveries right now, and perhaps at all times, since one doesn’t necessarily expect an art gallery at the top of a train station.

And this isn’t some cutesy, gift-shop-style afterthought — ARTS at King Street Station is a whole other world, 7,500 square feet of it, with two exhibits, vast brick walls, a plush velvet couch and views of the trains coming and going below. Entering feels like discovering a secret space, an arts oasis in the midst of transit hustle and bustle.

And we haven’t even mentioned the artworks themselves. In Heidi Grace Acuña hands, crocodile sculptures become unexpectedly tender, bursting with found flowers, curled up cutely on tables or fashioned into useful objects like toothbrush holders and coin trays. One stretches its mottled pink mouth wide to reveal gold teeth and a mirror — a clever nod to the way we’re always making symbols in our own image and interpreting them according to our own cultures.

For Acuña, the artworks are a means of reconnecting to the precolonial beliefs of her Filipino ancestors, in which the crocodile (or buwaya) is both feared and revered. “Some sculptures are used to connect us with the spirits, such as the candleholders and an incense holder,” she writes. “Other items represent what I hope for us and our descendants: books for knowledge, a toothbrush holder for good health, jewelry for personal identity and protection.”

Up toward the ceiling, vintage and secondhand textiles are draped from the ceiling in “Blessed Water,” meant to represent the power of water to heal and renew. At the edges of the exhibit (in a collaboration with Arabella Bautista), old televisions show an image of a buwaya swimming between them — meant as a kind of protective fence between the exhibit and the outside world.

All in all, it’s a delightful little break from the mundane and a chance to see these creatures in a new light. No crocodile tears here.