In Chinese, both goats and sheep are called yang 羊, which sounds like the word for “sun” (yang 陽). Three goats together, a motif repeated three times here, thus evokes the phrase “three suns welcome spring” (sanyang kaitai 三陽開泰), a wish for an auspicious new year taken from the ancient Book of Change (Yi Jing).
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The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
