Chèo Méo 2025 – An Art Initiative Raising Awareness for Children with Special Needs
From December 27, 2025 to January 3, 2026, the project to raise awareness about children with special needs “Chèo Méo 2025” took place at COMPLEX 01. “Chèo méo” is a Vietnamese phonetic transcription of the sound that Minh – a child with autism – continuously makes in Tohe’s art class, a personal expression method beyond conventional language.
Developed from the 2024 project, Chèo Méo 2025 focused more deeply on each family’s journey accompanying their children. The 7-month project with 16 families was developed step by step through research, discussion, workshops, and co-creation. Artists did not create independently but opened interactive spaces, skillfully incorporating diverse artistic languages as means to help parents and children spend time together. The creative process became a place to mark emotions, transformations, and interactions among family members.
Exhibition “Entering the world of special needs children through multidimensional observations”
The exhibition space became a “living archive” of connections in families with special needs children. As curator Ngan Hanh shared, it is “a complex bond, hard to describe because it contains more than just family love, it is much patience, sacrifice, and even contradictions and conflicts.” The exhibition displayed co-created products from 7 months of accompaniment – where art became a gesture of care and attention, allowing parents and children to play together, share, and explore interaction capabilities beyond words.
Family Tour – Listening tour with families of young artists
Unlike a typical guided tour, Family Tour was led by parents themselves – those who accompany children and participate with their children in the co-creation process. Parents shared about 7 months accompanying the project: from the first meetings with artists, experiments, until families gradually found working methods suitable for their own rhythm, emotions, and capabilities.
In that process, art became an open process – where parents and children observe together, play together, adjust together, and learn to listen to each other. Family Tour was an opportunity for parents to speak up as those who understand their children best, sharing authentically about “going with the child” in creation and in daily life. The direct Q&A session created conditions for the public to dialogue and listen from those directly involved, opening deeper empathy about the family accompaniment process.
Workshop “Give me a thread”
A workshop for families and children, where family members sat next to each other to tell each other very familiar stories. Each person brought an item once attached to their family: an old shirt, pillowcase, or toy no longer used – things that have been lying quietly in the closet for a long time but have never been thrown away.
When these familiar items were placed on the table, stories gradually emerged. Under the artist’s guidance, everyone shared and pieced together these memory fragments. Gradually, they became a pillow or carpet carrying many memories – a place for the whole family to sit together, lie together. Each knot kept a memory. When the workshop ended, each person took home not just an item, but a complete afternoon – where a new memory was tied together with family.
Talk “Chèo Méo 2025 – Art as a gesture of care”
The talk gathered artists, parents, and project team to share observations and resonances from nearly 7 months of project implementation. Care can be a greeting, a timely question, sometimes silent and light as breath, sometimes an immense force. For families with special needs children, it is the process of being together, learning to listen, adapt, and accompany through each stage of growth.
Through shared stories, art emerged as a gesture of care – both the attention the project dedicates to families and the space for family members to care for each other. Through the creative process, children flow according to their natural expression, beyond the limits of common language; parents and siblings have a quiet space to listen, review the journey accompanying children.
Workshop “Let’s Together”
On the morning of January 3, 2026, the final workshop “Let’s Together” led by artist Bui Duc Thao welcomed 4 families in the chilly early-year atmosphere. “Let’s Together” means playing together, trying together, going together – where parents and children spend time being “present” with each other through simple interactive activities that require much attention and mutual adjustment. At the workshop’s end, families admired their works together and acknowledged each other for spending time together.
Chèo Méo 2025 concluded with authentic stories about the journey of accompanying children with special needs. The project created a safe space where art was approached as a language for care to be expressed. Art wove into life, marking daily developments, observations of each other, nurturing and accompaniment in family relationships.
