In literary writing, colour has long been treated as a subsidiary component of visual representation, with its ontological significance consistently marginalized. Taking the colour discourse in Can Xue’s fiction as a starting point, this paper systematically examines the shift in colour theory from essentialist approaches to phenomenological and language-game paradigms, drawing on theoretical perspectives from art history, phenomenology, and the philosophy of language. Through an analysis of colour theories advanced by figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein, this paper argues that colour can no longer be understood as a passive representation of objective optics. Rather, it functions as a “phenomenological fold” in which subject and world are mutually constituted, and further, as a site where power disciplines meaning and meaning, in turn, evades such discipline within language games. The fantastical colour imagery in Can Xue’s novels exemplifies this paradigmatic shift— reconfiguring the ontological standing of colour in literature t hrough sensory transgression and grammatical deviation.