This work interrogates red as urban semiotics’ most visceral signifier—a color that straddles raw perception and coded meaning. Before becoming symbol (danger, desire, defiance), it operates as physiological event: a wavelength that quickens pulses and hijacks attention. Its eventual signification—as stop sign, bloodstain, or protest mark—is secondary to this primal impact, revealing how cities weaponize chromatic biology.

Red’s power lies in its evolutionary “pop-out” effect, exploited by urban systems yet resistant to fixed interpretation. The same hue that enforces order (barriers, alarms) simultaneously signals transgression (vandalism, illicit acts), creating a semantic battleground where control and rebellion collide. This duality manifests phenomenologically: following Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world,” red dissolves boundaries between object and viewer, existing as both surface pigment and somatic vibration—felt by the sighted and blind alike.

Ultimately, the series frames red as the city’s pre-linguistic language. Its meanings emerge not from stable codes but from direct neural negotiation—a chromatic paradox that is both imperative and instability. In asphalt, steel, and flesh, red remains the only color that commands while it unsettles, constructing urban experience through sheer perceptual violence.