It was funded through Illuminate, a donor-funded effort to revitalize San Francisco using large-scale art. It took Novy and his team three days to paint the whale-sized koi fish in Fulton Plaza.

They're made my Lillian Lee and her team at Serene Life Art, a studio in China ... care of them for 12 years before painting them. Typically, making one koi fish takes six to eight layers of ...