Wang Contemporary — Gallery & Collection
A content-rich contemporary-art gallery site with a headless CMS, so the gallery manages its own exhibitions and works without a developer in the loop.
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The Wang Contemporary positions itself as “a cultural vanguard born in Chinatown, global in vision.” A gallery’s website is really a publishing tool — exhibitions open and close, the program rotates, and the team needs to update all of it without calling anyone. Wang needed a site that lets the art lead and a content system the gallery actually controls.
The challenge
Art sites live or die on imagery and pacing: the work has to be the loudest thing on the page, and the layout has to give it room to breathe. At the same time, the gallery needed full editorial control — publishing events like “20000 Variations on a Paper Plane in Flight,” running its Ying Wang Prize program, managing team and partners — without touching code. That means modeling content the way the gallery actually thinks, not the way a generic CMS wants to box it in.
The approach
We built the front end in Next.js 16 / React 19 with styled-components for a precise, image-forward layout and Framer Motion for restrained transitions. Content runs on Sanity via next-sanity, with an embedded Studio at /studio so editors never leave the site to publish. The schema is built around the gallery’s real objects, and on-demand revalidation keeps published pages fresh the moment an editor hits save.
What we built
- A Sanity content model matching the gallery’s program —
event,aboutPage,yingWangPrizePage,teamMember,partner,navigation,homePage, andsiteSettings— with reusablecontentSectionandseoFieldsobjects - An embedded Sanity Studio at
/studioand an on-demand revalidation API route, so edits go live without a redeploy - A dynamic events system (
/events/[slug]) withEventInfo, ticketing components (TicketEmbed,TicketModal), and a dedicated Ying Wang Prize page - An image-forward home and section design using Sanity’s image pipeline (
@sanity/image-url), withSectionHero,TextReveal,TaglineAnimation, and scroll-driven motion - A “Stay Up To Date” subscribe flow — a modal with email capture, code verification (send-code / verify routes), and Mailchimp sync
- Supporting infrastructure: a geo API route, health check, and ITM event feed wired into the same Next.js app
The outcome
The Wang Contemporary now publishes its program without a middleman, on a site that does the work justice. A well-built headless CMS is the difference between a site that’s maintained and one that quietly goes stale — and we build the former.