Cape Town artist Ed Young has been awarded the 2025 Helgaard Steyn Prize for his haunting sculptural work Other People’s Tears Are Only Water (2024), receiving R675 000 in recognition of his conceptual and technical achievement.
Ed Young, Other People’s Tears Are Only Water, 2024. Photo: Nina Lieska, Repro Pictures
Cape Town-based artist Ed Young has been named the winner of the 2025 Helgaard Steyn Prize for Sculpture for his work Other People’s Tears Are Only Water (2024) — a fragment of an upright piano cut to one-third of its original size, revealing its inner workings and history. Purchased from the historic Kimberley Hotel during the Covid lockdown, the piano has been transformed by Young into what he calls a “rectified readymade”, echoing Marcel Duchamp’s influence on contemporary art.
Judges praised the work’s “haunting quality that suggests both presence and absence,” describing it as a requiem to the past and a meditation on memory, loss, and the persistence of sound. The truncated form and the continuous high E note evoke a spectral atmosphere that, in the words of Young himself, makes “the work a ghost — a physical indicator of a fatalistic world.”
This year’s jury — Dr Louisemarié Combrink, Prof Janine Allen-Spies, and Andrew Lamprecht — commended the work for its conceptual precision, emotional resonance, and craftsmanship, calling it a “unique contribution to South African art.”
Born in Welkom in 1978, Young holds both a BFA and MFA (cum laude) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. His work has been exhibited widely across South Africa and internationally, including in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain.
The Helgaard Steyn Award, one of South Africa’s most prestigious art prizes, recognises excellence across four disciplines — music, painting, literature, and sculpture — awarded in rotation. Past winners include David Brown, Jackson Hlungwani, Wim Botha, and Mary Sibande.
The Helgaard Steyn Prize for Sculpture is awarded every four years to an artist whose work demonstrates exceptional creativity and contribution to the field. For more information, visit the Helgaard Steyn Foundation.
