How I Built My Mom’s Online Art Museum in 6 Hours
The day AI built a gallery without permission — and how we shipped it for real
My mom has been doing calligraphy, minhwa (Korean folk painting), and lettering art for over 30 years, but everything she made just sat at home. She exhibits regularly offline and holds positions in arts associations — but online, she had no presence at all. So I decided to build her a website. The thing is, I didn’t want a simple portfolio site. It had to feel like you were actually walking into an exhibition.
While planning things out with AI, this line came up: “If you just line up the works, it’s a portfolio. If it feels like you’ve stepped into a space the moment you walk in, that’s an exhibition.” We spent a while talking about what makes that difference, and landed on four things.
The first was whitespace and breathing room. In a real gallery, there’s one piece per wall. That empty space isn’t awkward — it’s a signal saying “pay attention to this one.” The second was the entrance. Exhibitions have a doorway. The idea was a single signature piece floating softly on the first screen, with the other works revealing themselves one by one only as you scroll down. The third was the feeling of walking — when a piece fades in smoothly as you scroll, it recreates that moment of rounding a corner and coming face to face with the next work. The fourth was the label. Just adding a line next to the piece with the title, materials, dimensions, and year turns a photo into a “displayed work.”
Then, as I looked more closely at my mom’s pieces, I noticed something. Whether it was calligraphy, folk painting, or lettering — there was a consistent thread running through everything. It was never text here, image there. Words and images always met on the same canvas. So I decided to build the exhibition with a narrative through-line: you enter the calligraphy hall to see the roots, move into the minhwa hall to watch the brush branch out into painting, and arrive at the lettering hall to see tradition flowing into the contemporary.
The most interesting moment in the planning session was when we started talking about the nakwan — the red seal stamp on each of her pieces. That stamp was basically her logo. Ink black, hanji beige, seal red. Those three colors became the entire palette for the site.
But the real plot twist came later.
I’d uploaded the plan and some photos of her work to Claude Designer — I was about to ask what stack to use. But when I read the response, a complete 41-piece gallery HTML was already done. 15 pieces in the calligraphy hall, 16 in the minhwa hall, 10 in the lettering hall, with the pond painting selected as the entrance piece. I literally typed out “I wasn’t asking you to build it yet lol.”
Having AI just go ahead and build it actually helped me lock in the direction faster. But I couldn’t ship it as-is. My mom needed to be able to upload works herself and curate her own featured exhibitions. A static site couldn’t do that. So I rebuilt it from scratch with Next.js + Prisma + SQLite + an admin CMS. The workflow is still that she texts me “let’s do a feature with these pieces this month” and I handle the upload — but ultimately she’s the curator and I’m just the installation crew.
For deployment, I reused the home server that already had my stock app running. Added one domain block to Caddy, used DuckDNS to track the IP, and connected a CNAME. The first deploy threw a duplicate artwork ID error (P2002) — I fixed it by removing the manual ID field and switching to auto-generation from the title. The push-to-deploy pipeline was the same setup I’d already built for the stock app.
From the very beginning, this site had one goal: “A place to show work, not sell it.” Having tried and shelved a shop-first approach before made that direction even clearer. The pieces don’t need price tags. The right flow is: someone looks at the work long enough that they think “I want to own this” — and then they reach out. That’s what a gallery feels like.
If you have a family member with work to share, figure out “what feeling do you want people to have when they walk in” before you think about the tech stack. A little whitespace and a single fade-in is enough to turn a portfolio into an exhibition.
Background: Why I started slowloop · Method: Running multiple apps on one home server · Home server deployment lessons · See also: Stock app home server deploy · From personal wiki to product