Setting up a VPN server/peer on your router will not inherently force all internet traffic through the tunnel. @vgaetera provided a link to VPN PBR, but you probably don't even need that. Since you're really enabling remote access to the network from outside, the LAN traffic will not be affected (this is quite different than when you are configuring your router to utilize a remote VPN for outgoing traffic).
If your VPN is configured on the OpenWrt router, you can ask for help here in these forums -- I'd recommend starting a new thread to address questions like that since it isn't related to this specific thread.
@Hegabo I gave this a try but the AP page doesn't load.
To verify if my port forwarding is correct, I added a desktop in the lan with apache test page. Setup the forward rule on a different source port and it worked.
I also verified through tcpdump that requests are getting forwarded in the router to the lan port.
Looks like no response from the AP.
Is the AP dropping these packets due to it's firewall or something?
It's a normal consumer grade router; with dhcp disabled and a static lan IP.
Any idea why it wouldn't work?