Gary Wang came to the bass late and to jazz later still. He started classical piano at six, but preferred playing guitar in local rock bands, and it was only as a teenager that jazz took hold; he switched to acoustic bass at seventeen. The move worked fast. Playing in the Andover High School small ensemble, he competed twice in the Berklee College of Music high school jazz competition, taking second place in 1989 and first in 1990. He entered Columbia University in 1991 and graduated magna cum laude in 1995 with a B.A. in computer science, studying classical bass on the side with Linda McKnight of the Manhattan School of Music and playing in Columbia's classical and jazz ensembles. The decision to make jazz a career rather than a parallel life came only after he had the degree in hand.

From 1995 he worked in New York as a full-time bassist, and the first decade put him in the bands of T.S. Monk, Don Braden, Stanley Turrentine, Willie Williams, Dena DeRose, David Hazeltine, Jon Gordon and Matt Wilson, as well as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Ambassadors band. The clearest surviving document of that period is T.S. Monk's Monk On Monk (N2K Encoded Music, recorded February 6 to 27, 1997, engineered by Rudy Van Gelder), an all-star reading of Thelonious Monk's book on which the bass chair rotates: Wang takes three of the nine pieces, and the other six are split between Ron Carter, Dave Holland and Christian McBride. His three are "Dear Ruby," with Kevin Mahogany singing and Roy Hargrove on flugelhorn; "Suddenly," with Dianne Reeves and Nnenna Freelon on vocals and a Clark Terry solo; and "Ugly Beauty," with Geri Allen at the piano and a Wallace Roney solo. Ronnie Mathews plays piano on two of the three. In 2002 Wang was selected alongside saxophonist Virginia Mayhew and drummer Allison Miller for a U.S. State Department Jazz Ambassadors tour, seven weeks through the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, among them Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus and Ukraine.

The association that has run longest began at the end of the 1990s. The pianist Anat Fort self-produced her debut Peel in 1999 and, on the strength of its reception, formed a working band with German drummer Roland Schneider and Wang. By April 5, 2003 the group was playing new Fort compositions at Roulette in New York with clarinetist Perry Robinson added, and in November 2008 Wang was on the bandstand at the Rubin Museum in a trio with Fort and Paul Motian on drums. The trio's recording debut came with And If (ECM 2109), cut in Norway in February 2009 for Manfred Eicher and issued in 2010, and it has stayed intact ever since: Birdwatching (ECM 2382, 2016) with the Italian reed player Gianluigi Trovesi added, Colour (Sunnyside SSC 1550, 2019), and the double album The Berlin Sessions (Sunnyside SSC 1687, recorded at EBS and Hansa Studios in Berlin in April 2022). Fort's own account puts the group at more than twenty-five years active, and it has carried her to the Montreal Jazz Festival, the JVC Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Tel Aviv Opera House. Wang is a writer inside it as well as its bassist: he shares the composer credit on the closing piece of Birdwatching and on all four pieces of the first disc of The Berlin Sessions, and he supplied additional English liner texts and the liner photographs for Colour. In September 2024 the association came round on itself, when Fort recorded The Dreamworld of Paul Motian (Sunnyside SSC 1780, 2025), an album of Motian's compositions, with Wang on bass, Steve Cardenas on guitar and Matt Wilson on drums.

Around that spine sits the working life of a New York sideman. Wang was part of the Brooklyn Jazz Underground collective and its bjurecords label, appearing on all three of its volume compilations and on the David Smith Quintet's Anticipation (2010) and Impetus (2015) and Sunny Jain's Taboo (2010). He played acoustic bass on both Sunny Jain Collective records, Mango Festival (ZOHO, 2004) and Avaaz (2006). He was billed on the sleeve of the Vinson Valega Trio's Consilience (2003) alongside reed player Anton Denner, and returned for the expanded Vinson Valega Group's Biophilia (2009). Other leader dates he anchored include Sheryl Bailey's first quartet record For All Those Living (2010), Melissa Stylianou's Silent Movie (Anzic, 2012, produced by Oded Lev-Ari with Rodney Green on drums and guest turns from Anat Cohen and James Shipp), Tessa Souter's Obsession (Motema, 2009), the Jamie Reynolds Trio's Time With People (2012), The David Ullmann 8's Corduroy (2014) and Aaron Irwin's Music for Sextet (Innova, 2021). Three of the drummers he has worked beside are profiled here in their own right: the drummer Heinrich Kobberling was in the rhythm section with him on the Derek Bronston Group's Longing, cut in Brooklyn in November 1998, the drummer Anthony Pinciotti partnered him on Russ Spiegel's Chimera (SteepleChase, 2007) and again on Impetus, and the drummer Doron Tirosh shared an hour-long City College recital with him, Jon De Lucia and Ray Gallon in November 2018. The SmallsLIVE performance archive lists more than eighty of his dated sets at Smalls and Mezzrow between January 2008 and 2026, with standing trios led by Ed Cherry, Bennett Paster, David Cook and Jamie Reynolds recurring month after month.

Two strands of his work sit outside jazz altogether. Under the name Shapes On Parade he has self-released two albums of instrumental music built entirely at home in Brooklyn, Pleasant Colony (2016) and Full Circle (2017), the second of them a set of scores written for choreographer Kakuti Davis Lin and Baltimore's Full Circle Dance Company; the credit line on both reads that all the noises were played, produced, recorded and mixed by him. On stage he has played bass in Taylor Mac and Matt Ray's Bark of Millions, and he subs regularly in the pit of the Broadway musical Hadestown. He also contributed bass and guitar to Jeff Grace's score for the horror film Stake Land, whose soundtrack album appeared in 2011, and has done production and overdubbing work on records by Michael Leonhart, Sam Sadigursky and Goh Nakamura.

Wang is a supporting bassist by temperament rather than a soloist looking for a feature, and the shape of his career reflects it: leaders keep him for years at a time, and the records he is on tend to be the ones where the bass is doing structural work. That suits both ends of what he does. In the Anat Fort Trio, an ECM group whose vocabulary is space, patience and small gestures, he is one third of a collectively composing unit, credited as co-author of the free pieces the group builds without a written theme. In the Brooklyn post-bop and mainstream world of bjurecords, Smalls and Mezzrow, he is the reliable acoustic anchor in guitar and organ trios, vocal quartets and horn-led quintets, playing a warm, unhurried, time-first line. The multi-instrumentalism is real but almost entirely private: the two Shapes On Parade albums, on which he plays every instrument himself, are instrumental rock and experimental music rather than jazz, and nothing about them shows up in the way he plays a standard.