Arts Studies and Criticism

This article focuses on the phenomenon of color symbolism in contemporary art, systematically sorting out its theoretical evolution from the traditional symbolic system to the modernist revolution, and then to the theoretical reconstruction in the contemporary context, revealing the dynamic development process of color symbolism. By analyzing the interaction between artists’ coding strategies and media technology coding, this study explores the generation mechanism of color symbolism. Combining cross-cultural communication cases, explain the laws of maintaining and mutating cultural prototypes in communication, and reveal the decoding logic of the audience from the perspective of reception aesthetics. Based on the research results of cognitive neuroscience, this study reveals the physiological basis and psychological perception mechanism of color symbolism, providing an interdisciplinary analytical framework for understanding the complex aesthetic value of color symbolism in contemporary art.